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*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE DOCTRINE OF EVOLUTION ***
1906-1907
NEW YORK:
LEMCKE & BUECHNER
30-32 WEST 27TH STREET
LONDON:
HUMPHREY MILFORD
AMEN CORNER, E.C.
New York
1916
COPYRIGHT, 1911,
Norwood Press
J.S. Cushing Co.--Berwick & Smith Co.
Norwood, Mass., U.S.A.
PREFACE
It may seem that the biologist is straying beyond his subject when he
undertakes to extend the principles of organic evolution to those
possessions of mankind that seem to be unique. The task was undertaken in
the Hewitt Lectures because the writer holds the deeply grounded
conviction that evolution has been continuous throughout, and that the
study of lower organic forms where laws reveal themselves in more
fundamental simplicity must lead the investigator to employ and apply
those laws in the study of the highest natural phenomena that can be
found. Another motive was equally strong. Too frequently men of science
are accused of restricting the application of their results to their own
particular fields of inquiry. As individuals they use their knowledge for
the development of world conceptions, which they are usually reluctant to
display before the world. It is because I believe that the accusation is
often only too well merited that I have endeavored to show as well as
circumstances permit how universal is the scope of the doctrine based upon
the facts of biology, and how supreme are its practical and dynamic
values.
It remains only to state that the present volume contains nothing new,
either in fact or in principle; the particular form and mode of presenting
the evolutionary history of nature may be considered as the author's
personal contribution to the subject. Nothing has been stated that has not
the sanction of high authority as well as of the writer's own conviction;
but it will be clear that the believers in the truth of the analysis as
made in the later chapters may become progressively fewer, as the various
aspects of human life and of human nature are severally treated.
Nevertheless, I believe that this volume presents a consistent reasonable
view that will not be essentially different from the conceptions of all
men of science who believe in evolution.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
V. THE PHYSICAL EVOLUTION OF THE HUMAN SPECIES AND OF HUMAN RACES 150
INDEX 313
It is difficult to find the right words with which to begin the discussion
of so vast a subject. As a general statement the doctrine is perhaps the
simplest formula of natural science, although the facts and processes
which it summarizes are the most complex that the human intellect can
contemplate. Nothing in natural history seems to be surer than evolution,
and yet the final solution of evolutionary problems defies the most subtle
skill of the trained analyst of nature's order. No single human mind can
contain all the facts of a single small department of natural science, nor
can one mind comprehend fully the relations of all the various departments
of knowledge, but nevertheless evolution seems to describe the history of
all facts and their relations throughout the entire field of knowledge.
Were it possible for a man to live a hundred years, he could only begin
the exploration of the vast domains of science, and were his life
prolonged indefinitely, his task would remain forever unaccomplished, for
progress in any direction would bring him inevitably to newer and still
unexplored regions of thought.
Although the doctrine of evolution was stated in very nearly its present
form more than a century ago, much misunderstanding still exists as to its
exact meaning and nature and value; and it is one of the primary objects
of these discussions to do away with certain current errors of judgment
about it. It is often supposed to be a remote and recondite subject,
intelligible only to the technical expert in knowledge, and apart from the
everyday world of life. It is more often conceived as a metaphysical and
philosophical system, something antagonistic to the deep-rooted religious
instincts and the theological beliefs of mankind. Truly all the facts of
knowledge are the materials of science, but science is not metaphysics or
philosophy or belief, even though the student who employs scientific
method is inevitably brought to consider problems belonging to these
diverse fields of thought. A study of nervous mechanism and organic
structure leads to the philosophical problem of the freedom of the will;
questions as to the evolution of mind and the way mind and matter are
related force the investigator to consider the problem of immortality. But
these and similar subjects in the field of extra-science are beyond its
sphere for the very good reason that scientific method, which we are to
define shortly, cannot be employed for their solution. Evolution is a
science; it is a description of nature's order, and its materials are
facts only. In method and content it is the very science of sciences,
describing all and holding true throughout each one.
And so we must approach the study of the several divisions of our subject
in this frame of mind. We must meet many difficulties, of which the chief
one is perhaps our own human nature. For we as men are involved, and it is
hard indeed to take an impersonal point of view,--to put aside all
thoughts of the consequences to us of evolution, if it is true. Yet
emotion and purely human interest are disturbing elements in intellectual
development which hamper the efforts of reason to form assured
conceptions. We must disregard for the time those insistent questions as
to higher human nature, even though we must inevitably consider them at
the last. Indeed, all the human problems must be put aside until we have
prepared the way for their study by learning what evolution means, what a
living organism is, and how sure is the evidence of organic
transformation. When we know what nature is like and what natural
processes are, then we may take up the questions of supreme and deep
concern about our own human lives.
* * * * *
Human curiosity has ever demanded answers to questions about the world and
its make-up. The primitive savage was concerned primarily with the
everyday work of seeking food and building huts and carrying on warfare,
and yet even he found time to classify the objects of his world and to
construct some theory about the powers that made them. His attainments may
seem crude and childish to-day, but they were the beginnings of classified
knowledge, which advanced or stood still as men found more or less time
for observation and thought. Freed from the strife of primeval and
medieval life, more and more observers and thinkers have enlarged the
boundaries and developed the territory of the known. The history of human
thought itself demonstrates an evolution which began with the savages'
vague interpretation of the "what" and the "why" of the universe, and
culminates in the science of to-day.
What, now, is a science? To many people the word denotes something cold
and unfeeling and rigid, or something that is somehow apart from daily
life and antagonistic to freedom of thought. But this is far from being
true. Karl Pearson defines science as _organized knowledge_, and Huxley
calls it _organized common sense_. These definitions mean the same thing.
They mean that in order to know anything that deserves confidence, in
order to obtain a real result, it is necessary in the first place to
establish the reality of facts and to discriminate between the true, the
not so sure, the merely possible, and the false. Having accurate and
verified data, scientific method then proceeds to classify them, and this
is the _organizing_ of knowledge. The final process involves a summary of
the facts and their relations by some simple expression or formula. A good
illustration of a scientific principle is the natural law of gravitation.
It states simply that two bodies of matter attract one another directly in
proportion to their mass, and inversely in proportion to the square of the
distance between them. In this concise rule are described the relations
which have been actually determined for masses of varying sizes and at
different distances apart,--for snowflakes falling to the earth, for the
avalanche on the mountain slope, and for the planets of the solar system,
moving in celestial co�rdination.
* * * * *
Wherever we look we see evidence of nature's change; every rain that falls
washes the earth from the hills and mountains into the valleys and into
the streams to be transported somewhere else; every wind that blows
produces its small or greater effect upon the face of the earth; the
beating of the ocean's waves upon the shore, the sweep of the great
tides,--these, too, have their transforming power. The geologists tell us
that such natural forces have remodeled and recast the various areas of
the earth and that they account for the present structure of its surface.
These men of science and the astronomers and the physicists tell us that
in some early age the world was not a solid globe, with continents and
oceans on its surface, as now; that it was so very hot as to be semi-fluid
or semi-solid in consistency. They tell us that before this time it was
still more fluid, and even a mass of fiery vapors. The earth's molten bulk
was part of a mass which was still more vast, and which included portions
which have since condensed to form the other bodies of the solar
system,--Mars and Jupiter and Venus and the rest,--while the sun remains as
the still fiery central core of the former nebulous materials, which have
undergone a natural history of change to become the solar system. The
whole sweep of events included in this long history is called cosmic
evolution; it is the greater and more inclusive process comprising all the
transformations which can be observed now and which have occurred in the
past.
At a certain time in the earth's history, after the hard outer crust had
been formed, it became possible for living materials to arise and for
simple primitive creatures to exist. Thus began the process of organic
evolution--_the natural history of living things_--with which we are
concerned in this and later addresses. Organic evolution is thus a part of
the greater cosmic process. As such it does not deal with the origin of
life, but it begins with life, and concerns itself with the evolution of
living things. And while the investigator is inevitably brought to
consider the fundamental question as to the way the first life began, as a
student of organic forms he takes life for granted and studies only the
relationships and characteristics of animals and plants, and their
origins.
The several kinds are no more interchangeable than are the different forms
of locomotives that we have mentioned. The flat-bottom boat of the
Mississippi would not venture to cross the Atlantic Ocean in winter, nor
would the "Lusitania" attempt to plow a way up the shallow mud-banked
Mississippi. These products of mechanical development are not efficient
unless they run under the circumstances which have controlled their
construction, unless they are fitted or adapted to the conditions under
which they must operate.
* * * * *
Among the familiar facts which science reveals in a new light are the
peculiarly definite qualities of living things as regards size and form.
There is no general agreement in these matters among the things of the
inorganic world. Water is water, whether it is a drop or the Pacific
Ocean; stone is stone, whether it is a pebble, a granite block, or a solid
peak of the Rocky Mountains. It is true that there is a considerable range
in size between the microscopic bacterium at one extreme and the elephant
or whale at the other, but this is far less extensive than in the case of
lifeless things like water and stone. In physical respects, water may be a
fluid, or a gas in the form of steam, or a solid, as a crystal of snow or
a block of ice. But the essential materials of living things agree
throughout the entire range of plant and animal forms in having a
jellylike consistency.
But by far the most striking and important characteristic of living things
is their definite and restricted chemical composition. Out of the eighty
and more chemical elements known to science, the essential substance of
living creatures is formed by only six to twelve. These are the simple and
obvious characteristics of living things which are denoted by the word
"organic." Everyone has a general idea of what this expression signifies,
but it is important to realize that it means, in exact scientific
terms,--_constituted in definite and peculiar ways_.
The next step in the analysis of organisms reveals the same wonderful
though familiar characteristics. The living organism is composed of parts
which are called _organs_, and these differ from one another in structural
and functional respects. Each of them performs a special task which the
others do not, and each differentiated organ does its part to make the
whole creature an efficient mechanism. The leg of the frog is an organ of
locomotion, the heart is a device for pumping blood, the stomach
accomplishes digestion, while the brain and nerves keep the parts working
in harmony and also provide for the proper relation of the whole creature
to its environment. So rigidly are these organs specialized in structure
and in function that they cannot replace one another, any more than the
drive wheels of the locomotive could replace the smokestack, or the boiler
be interchanged with either of these. All of the organs are thus fitted or
adjusted to a particular place in the body where they may most efficiently
perform their duties. Each organ therefore occupies a particular place in
an organic environment, so to speak. Thus the principle of adaptation
holds true for the organs which constitute an organism, as well as for
organisms themselves in their relations to their surroundings.
The various organs of living things are grouped so as to form the several
organic systems. There are eight of these, and each performs a group of
related tasks which are necessary for complete life. The alimentary system
concerns itself with three things: it gets food into the body, or ingests;
it transforms the insoluble foods by the intricate chemical processes of
digestion; and it absorbs or takes into itself the transformed food
substances, which are then passed on to the other parts of the body. It is
hardly necessary to point out that the ingestive structures for taking
food and preparing it mechanically lie at and near the mouth, while the
digesting parts, like the stomach, come next, because chemical
transformation is the next thing to be done; while finally the absorbing
portions of the tract, or the intestines, come last. The second group of
organs, like gills and lungs, supplies the oxygen, which is as necessary
for life as food itself; this respiratory system also provides for the
passage from the body of certain of the waste gases, like carbonic acid
gas and water vapor. The excretory system of kidneys and similar
structures collects the ash-waste produced by the burning tissues, and
discharges this from the whole mechanism, like the ash hoist of a
steamship. The circulatory system, made up of smaller and larger vessels,
with or without a heart, transports and propels the blood through the
body, carrying the absorbed foods, the supplies of oxygen, and the waste
substances of various kinds. All of these four systems are concerned with
"commissary" problems, so to speak, which every individual must solve for
and by itself.
All organisms must perform these eight functions in one way or another.
The bacterium, the simplest animal, the lowest plant, the higher plants
and animals,--all of these have a biological problem to solve which
comprises eight terms or parts, no more and no less. This is surely an
astonishing agreement when we consider the varied forms of living
creatures. And perhaps when we see that this is true we may understand why
adaptation is a characteristic of all organisms, for they all have similar
biological problems to solve, and their lives must necessarily be adjusted
in somewhat similar ways to their surroundings.
Finally, in the last analysis, all organisms and organs and tissues can be
resolved into elements which are called _cells_. They are not little
hollow cases, it is true, although for historical reasons we employ a word
that implies such a condition. They are unitary masses of living matter
with a peculiar central body or nucleus, and every tissue of every living
thing is composed of them.
The cells of bone differ from those of cartilage mainly in the different
consistency of the substances secreted by the cells to lie between them;
skin cells are soft-walled masses lying close together; even blood is a
tissue, although it is fluid and its cells are the corpuscles which float
freely in a liquid serum. Thus an organism proves to be a complex
mechanism composed of cells as structural units, just as a building is
ultimately a collection of bricks and girders and bolts, related to one
another in definite ways.
Our analysis reveals the living creature in an entirely new light, not
only as a machinelike structure whose parts are marvelously formed and
coordinated in material respects, but also as one whose activities or
workings are ultimately cellular in origin. Structure and function are
inseparable, and if an animal or a plant is an aggregate of cells, then
its whole varied life must be the sum total of the lives of its
constituent cells. Should these units be subtracted from an animal, one by
one, there would be no material organism left when the last cells had been
disassociated, and there would be no organic activity remaining when the
last individual cell-life was destroyed. All the various things we do in
the performance of our daily tasks are done by the combined action of our
muscle and nerve and other tissue cells; our life is all of their lives,
and nothing more. The cell, then, is the physiological or functional unit,
as truly as it is the material element of the organic world. Being
combined with countless others, specialized in various ways, relations are
established which are like those exhibited by the human beings
constituting a nation. In this case the life of the community consists of
the activities of the diverse human units that make it up. The farmer, the
manufacturer, the soldier, clerk, and artisan do not all work in the same
way; they undertake one or another of the economic tasks which they may be
best fitted by circumstances to perform. Their differentiation and
division of labor are identical with the diversity in structure and in
function as well, exhibited by the cells of a living creature. We might
speak of the several states as so many organs of our own nation; the
commercial or farming or manufacturing communities of a state would be
like the tissues forming an organ, made up ultimately of human units,
which, like cells, are engaged in similar activities. As the individual
human lives and the activities of differentiated economic groups
constitute the life of a nation and national existence, so cell-lives make
the living of an organism, and the expressions "division of labor" and
"differentiation" come to have a biological meaning and application.
* * * * *
The cell, then, is in all respects the very unit of the organic world. Not
only is it the ultimate structural element of all the more familiar
animals and plants that we know, as the foregoing analysis demonstrates,
but, in the second place, the microscope reveals simple little organisms,
like _Amoeba_, the yeast plant and bacteria, which consist throughout
their lives of just one cell and nothing more. Still more wonderful is the
fact that the larger complex organisms actually begin existence as single
cells. In three ways, therefore,--the analytic, the comparative, and the
developmental,--the cell proves to be the "organic individual of the first
order." As the ultimate biological unit, its essential nature must possess
a profound interest, for in its substance resides the secret of life.
* * * * *
* * * * *
We have now learned that evolution means a common ancestry of living forms
that have come to differ in the course of time; our common reason has
shown us also that organisms are in a true sense complicated chemical
mechanisms adapted to meet the conditions under which they must operate.
We come now to the evidences offered by the organic world that evolution
is true and that natural forces control its workings. Clearly the
examination of the matter of _fact_ is independent of the question of
_method_. For just as the chemist may experiment with various substances
to see if they will dissolve in water and not in alcohol before it is
necessary or desirable for him to take up the further studies of the laws
of solution, so reasonable grounds must be found for regarding evolution
as true before passing to its method of accomplishment. And in the
following discussions, the animals will be used almost exclusively, not
because the study of plants fails to discover the same relations and
principles, but because the better known animal series is more varied and
extensive, and above all for the reason that the human organism arrays
itself as the highest term of the animal series.
II
Let us begin with the common cat and the group of carnivora or
flesh-eating animals to which it belongs. As we pass along the streets of
the city, we will see many cats which differ in some details, though they
resemble one another closely. While they vary somewhat in form, the range
in this quality is not so noticeable as in the matter of color; some of
them will be gray, some maltese, while others will be yellowish or black,
and they will differ in the striped or spotted character of their
coloration. We readily classify them all as "cats" in spite of their
differences, because they are alike in so many ways that we have learned
to associate as the distinguishing characteristics of these animals, and
to label--"cat." The animals which we might see in a walk of several
blocks may reasonably be regarded as offspring of the same pair of
ancestors of a few years back, even though they are dissimilar. We all
know that the kittens of one and the same litter vary: no two of them are
ever exactly alike in color or disposition or voice or size, nor is any
one identical with either of its parents, although it may be necessary to
employ exact means of measuring them in order to demonstrate their
variation. The fact of difference, then, is surely not inconsistent with
even the closest ties of blood, and we do not need to go beyond the scope
of daily observation to find that this is true in nature wherever we look.
Thus at the very outset our simple illustration establishes the most
fundamental principle of comparative anatomy. Let us see how it works
further. The Manx cat possesses an abbreviated tail, although in other
respects it is practically the same as the familiar long-tailed form; the
Angora and the Persian differ in having long hair. All of these animals
are so much alike in so many respects, and so closely resemble the wild
cats, that it is not unreasonable to regard them all as the descendants of
the same original wild ancestors, and as the varying products of lines
which branched out from the same stock in different directions and at
different times. It is, in a word, their "cat-_ness_" which demonstrates
their relationships. But common sense need not stop here. Guided by the
facts of anatomical similarity, it convinces us that the dun-colored lion
and puma, the striped tiger and the spotted leopard are simply cats of a
larger growth whose remoter ancestry is one with that of the previously
cited forms. Not until we explore and compare their several systems do we
see how thoroughgoing is their uniformity in structural plan. And because
reason justifies the view regarding the origin of domestic cats from wild
ancestors, the evolution of all the various members of the cat tribe must
be acknowledged. These animals exhibit a fundamental likeness, which, to
employ a musical analogy, is the "theme" of "cat-_ness_," and they are so
many variations of this theme.
So far the examples have been taken from one order of the highest class of
backboned animals, called mammalia. When our survey is extended to other
divisions of this class, additional laws of organic relationship are
discovered. If in a series of evolving generations the line of
modification proceeding from a terrestrial animal like a cat to
semi-aquatic and marine types substantially like an otter and a seal should
be carried further, it will inevitably lead to forms possessing characters
such as those displayed by whales and the related porpoises, dolphins, and
narwhals of the order cetacea. In their make-up all of these animals
clearly possess the general characteristics of mammals, and they
constitute collectively another limb which has sprung from the same stock
as the carnivora, although at an earlier time. This we believe because of
their plan of body and because their peculiar organization fits them even
more perfectly than the seals for aquatic existence that is their only
possible mode of life. In the case of the whales the bony framework of the
fore limb is again like that of the cat's leg, although the whole
structure is a flexible finlike paddle. The hind limb has disappeared as
an efficient organ, but the significant fact is that small rudiments of
hind limbs are present just where corresponding structures are placed in
the seal. These vestiges cannot be reasonably accounted for, unless they
are the degenerate hinder limbs of a remote four-footed ancestor.
Furthermore the unborn whale possesses a complete coat of hair, which is
afterwards replaced by blubber; but hair is a thatchlike coat to shed
rain, as the way the hairs lie on a terrestrial mammal indicates. We are
therefore forced to conclude that whales have originated from four-footed
animals walking about on land, because no opposed explanation gives so
reasonable an interpretation of the observed facts.
We must pass with only brief mention the lower orders of mammalia, like
the insect-eating forms to which armadillos and ant-bears belong. Of
greater interest are the pouched mammals like the kangaroo and opossums,
which live almost exclusively in the Australian realm. The kangaroo is
endowed with a head somewhat like that of a goat, and well-developed hind
legs that enable it to make leaps of astonishing length. Some of its
relatives, such as the bandicoot, are like rats, or like bears, as in the
case of the wombat. The Tasmanian wolf is another true marsupial, even
though divergent adaptation has brought it to resemble the carnivora of
the dog tribe in general appearance and in special structures like the
teeth. Finally at the very bottom of the mammalian scale are two small
forms living in the Australian faunal region. The duckbill or
_Ornithorhynchus_ is the better known animal, with its close fur, webbed
feet, and flattened ducklike beak, while its only other near relative, the
_Echidna_, is somewhat similar to the spiny hedgehog in external
appearance. A unique peculiarity of these two forms is that they produce
eggs much like those of reptiles and birds, and this fact, together with
others of a structural nature, brings the whole group of mammals near to
the lower classes of the Vertebrata.
Looking back on the several orders of mammals, it will be seen that the
last mentioned are much less differentiated or specialized in their
general organization. Above the level of the egg-layers and the pouched
mammals, the higher orders branch out in different directions and reach up
to various levels of the scale of animal organization.
* * * * *
The birds are another class of backboned animals which exhibit identical
principles of relationship. A heron has long legs and wide-spreading toes,
which keep its body out of the water as it stalks about the marshes where
it seeks its food; its bill is a long slender pincers. Compare it with an
eagle; the latter has a short and heavily hooked beak to tear flesh, while
its stout legs bear strongly curved talons to hold its struggling prey.
Swimming birds like the swan and duck and loon possess feet which are
constructed in general like those of the former examples, but they are
webbed and shortened to serve as paddles. In the penguin we find a
counterpart of the seal among mammals; its feathers are much reduced and
its fore limbs are no longer wings enabling the animal to fly, but they
are paddles which it uses when it swims in pursuit of fish. Finally the
ostrich and wingless bird of New Zealand--the _Apteryx_--have wings that
are useless vestiges, which, in the latter case, are hidden under the
brushlike feathers covering the body. It is unnecessary to add more
examples, for even these few illustrations establish exactly the same
principles of relationship and evidences of evolution that are to be found
in the series of mammalia.
Reptiles also are grouped, like the mammals and birds, as variations about
a central theme. An ordinary lizard is perhaps the nearest in form to the
remote ancestor from which all have sprung. Some lizards are long and very
slender, with all four limbs of greatly reduced size. Others, which are
still true lizards, have lost the hind limbs, or even all the legs, as in
the "blind worms" of England. One step more, and an animal which has
progressed further along a similar line of descent would be a snake. Just
as whales as a group are derivable from forms which resemble types
belonging to another order, so snakes as an order are to be regarded as
more radically altered derivatives of some four-footed lizardlike
creature. Alligators are very much like lizards in general form, and their
order is a diverging branch from the same limb. Finally the evolution of
turtles from the same ancestors is intelligible if we begin with a short
stout animal like the so-called "horned toad" of Arizona, and proceed to
the soft-shelled tortoise of the Mississippi River system; the
establishment of a bony armor completes the evolution of the familiar and
more characteristic turtle.
Frogs and salamanders constitute another lower class, called the amphibia,
whose members are gilled during the earlier stages of development. An
adult frog is essentially a salamander without a tail and with highly
developed hinder limbs. The salamanders differ as regards the number of
fishlike gill clefts that they all possess in their young stages, but
which disappear entirely or in part during later life. In comparison with
the lizard as a typical reptile, a salamander is more primitive in all of
its inner organic systems, while in its nearly continuous body, with head
and tail gradually merging into the trunk, it also displays a somewhat
simpler form of body.
The fishes are the lowest among the common vertebrates, and they offer an
abundance of independent testimony as to the truth of the principles of
comparative anatomy. The common shark is perhaps the most fundamental
form, with a hull-like body undivided into head, trunk, and tail, and from
it have originated such peculiar variations as the hammerhead and skate.
Among fishes with true bones, a cod or trout is the most typical in
general features. Without ceasing to be true bony fishes, the trunk-fish
and cow-fish are adapted by their peculiar characters of spine and armor
plate to repel many enemies. The puff fish can take in a great amount of
water, when disturbed, so as to become too large to be swallowed by some
of its foes, illustrating another adaptive modification for self-defense.
The wonderful colors and color patterns of the tropical fish of the reef,
or of the open water forms like the mouse-fish of the Sargossa Sea, often
render them more or less completely hidden from the foraging enemy. A
flounder looks like a fish which was originally symmetrical, but which had
come to lie flat on its side upon the bottom, whereupon the eye underneath
had left its original place to appear on the upper surface. The difficult
and unusual conditions of deep-sea existence have been met by fishes in
two ways; some forms possess luminous frilled and weedlike fins, which
lure their prey to within easy reach of their jaws, while others have
enormous eyes, so as to make use of all possible rays of light in their
pursuit of food organisms. But all of these diverse forms are true
_fishes_, possessing a common heritage of structure which demonstrates
their unity of origin.
The brief review of backboned animals has shown how comprehensive are the
principles of relationship. The families and tribes of each order, such as
the carnivora, are like branches arising from a single limb; the orders in
their turn exhibit common qualities of structure which mean that they have
grown from the same antecedents, while even the larger divisions or
classes of mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibia, and fishes, possess a deep
underlying theme whose dominant motif is the backbone, which proves their
ultimate unity in ancestry. The greater and lesser branches have reached
different levels, for the fish is clearly simpler in its make-up than the
highly specialized bird. But the great fact is that structural evidences
demonstrating the reality of genealogical affinities are displayed by the
entire series of vertebrates; although they differ much or little in many
or fewer respects they have one and the same ground-plan.
* * * * *
The lower animals devoid of backbones, and therefore called invertebrates,
are not so well-known except to the student of comparative anatomy,
because they are not so often met with, and because they are usually very
small or microscopic; but in many respects their importance to the
evolutionist surpasses that of the vertebrates. Their structural plans are
far more varied, and they range more widely from higher and relatively
complicated organisms to the unitary one-celled animals. A knowledge of
some of them is essential for our present purpose, which is to learn how
sure is the basis for the principles of relationship and how complete is
the structural evidence of evolution.
Worms are represented in the minds of most people by the common earthworm
or sandworm. The body in either case is made up of a series of segments or
joints which agree closely throughout the animal in external appearance
and in internal constitution. A section of the digestive tract, a pair of
nerve centers, two funnel-like tubes for excretion, and similar blood
vessels occur in each portion.
It may seem that such an animal is totally unlike any of the higher and
more complex types. In certain respects, however, it is identical with the
other forms inasmuch as it performs all of the eight biological tasks
demanded by nature. It is also similar in so far as its inner layer, like
the innermost sheet of cells in higher forms, is concerned with problems
of taking and preparing food, while the protective outer layer resembles
in function the outermost covering of all animals higher in the scale.
Beyond these a still more fundamental agreement is found in its cellular
composition.
At the lower end of the animal scale are organisms which consist of one
cell and nothing more. _Amoeba_, to which we must refer again and again,
is an example of this group which possesses an overwhelming importance to
the comparative student because the origins of all the characteristics of
animals higher in the scale are to be found within it. _Amoeba_ itself
is a naked mass of protoplasm, about 1/100 of an inch in diameter,
enclosing a nucleus. Its form is not constant during activity, for
fingerlike processes called pseudopodia are pushed out tentatively in many
directions to be followed as circumstances direct by the materials of the
whole cell body. Other protozoa differ in possessing constant forms, or in
having constant vibratile processes, or shells of some kind, while in
still other cases like individuals combine to make colonies which are more
or less definite and permanent. Here at the very foot of the organic scale
are found animals which seem to be entirely different from those above.
Upon examination they, like _Hydra_, prove to be the same as regards the
number and kind of functions they perform, but in structural regards their
evolutionary relation to all higher animals is indicated solely by the
fact that they are cells composed of protoplasm. Nevertheless the
principle which states that resemblance means consanguinity still holds
true, for cellular constitution is a unique possession of things of the
living world,--something which demonstrates the common origin of all
living things just as truly as the "cat-_ness_" of our first series of
examples reveals for a smaller group the significance of likeness and the
nature of the basic law of comparative anatomy.
* * * * *
Employing a figure of speech, we have climbed down the animal tree from
the higher regions where the mammals belong. Having reached the very foot
of the trunk we are in a position to review and summarize the evidences
which we have discovered all about us as we have descended. The various
examples we have mentioned and the groups to which they belong clearly
occupy different places in the scale which begins with the protozoa and
extends upward to the most complicated and differentiated animals. _Hydra_
takes its place above the protozoa for obvious structural reasons; worms
belong to a still higher zone, surpassed by the more complex jointed
animals like crustacea and insects. Far above these are the vertebrates,
among which we have already demonstrated the occurrence of different
grades of organization, from the fish up to the higher amphibia and
reptiles, and beyond in two directions to the diverging birds and mammals.
The basic characteristics of every group in a high position may be traced
back to some one or another of the divisions at a lower level, so that the
general sequence of the structural levels from low to high becomes
intelligible as the order of their evolution.
* * * * *
The animal feeds and grows during the months of its first summer, and
hibernates the following winter; with the warmth of spring it revives and
proceeds further along the course of its development. Near the base of the
tail two minute legs grow out from the hinder part of the body, and while
these are enlarging two front legs make their appearance a little behind
the gills. The tadpole now rises more frequently to the surface where it
takes small mouthfuls of air. Meanwhile great changes are effected inside
the body where the various systems of fishlike organs become remodeled
into amphibian structures. A sac is formed from the wall of the esophagus,
and this enlarges and divides to form the two simple lungs. The legs
increase in size, the tail dwindles more and more, the gills close up, and
soon the animal hops out on land as a complete young frog. From this time
on it breathes by means of its lungs instead of gills, even though it
returns to the water to escape its foes, to seek its prey, and to
hibernate in the mud of the lake bed during the winter months.
All these changes are familiar and natural, but until science places them
and similar facts in their proper relations their significance is lost to
us. The tadpole is essentially a fish in its general structure and mode of
life, even though its heritage is such that it can develop into a higher
animal. When it does become a frog it proves beyond a doubt that there is
no impassable barrier between fishes and amphibia. Our earlier comparison
of the structures of these two classes of vertebrates led to the
conclusion that the latter had evolved from antecedents like the former,
and had thus followed them upon the earth; now that sequence seems to have
some connection with the method by which a tadpole, obviously not a fish
but nevertheless actually fishlike, changes into a frog, a member of a
higher class of vertebrates. This method is employed by developing frogs
apparently because it follows the ancestral order of events, and because,
so to speak, the only way a frog knows how to become a frog is to develop
from an egg first into a fishlike tadpole and then to alter itself as its
ancestors did during their evolution in the past. We begin to see, then,
that in addition to the impressive fact of development itself, the mode of
organic transformation is far more conclusive evidence of evolution,
because it reveals an order of events which parallels the order
established by comparative anatomy as the evolutionary sequence.
Only a few of the countless details have been mentioned which demonstrate
the resemblance of the successive stages first to fishes, and later to
amphibia and reptiles. We have a wide choice of materials, but even the
foregoing brief list of illustrations shows that the order in which the
stages follow is the one which comparative anatomy independently proves to
be the order of the evolution of fishes, amphibia, reptiles, and birds.
Why, now, should it be necessary for a developing bird to follow this
order? The answer has been found in the immense array of embryological
facts that investigators have verified and classified, that all tell the
same story. It is, that birds have arisen by evolution from ancestors
which were really as simple as the members of these lower classes. It
seems then that the only way a bird of to-day can become itself is to
traverse the path along which its progenitors had progressed in evolution.
Stating its conclusions precisely, science formulates the principle in the
following words: _individual development is a brief r�sum� of the history
of the species in past times_, or, more technically, _ontogeny
recapitulates phylogeny_. To be sure, the full history is not reviewed in
detail, for the chick embryo does not actually swim in water and breathe
by means of gills. Only a condensed account of evolution of its kind is
presented by an embryo during its development; as Huxley and Haeckel have
put it, whole lines and paragraphs and even pages are left out; many false
passages of a later date are inserted as the result of peculiar larval and
embryonic needs and adjustments. But in its major statements and as a
general outline, the account is a trustworthy natural document submitted
as evidence that higher species of to-day have evolved from ancestors
which must have been like some of the present lower animals.
Coming now to the mammalia, it might seem that we have reached forms so
highly developed that they would not exhibit the same kind of
developmental history, but would have their own mode of growing up. This
is not so, for like the adult fish, the larval tadpole, and the embryo
chick, an embryo of a cat or a man is at one time constructed with a
series of gill-clefts and with blood-vessels and skeletal supports of
fishlike nature that are everywhere associated with gills. The embryos of
wildcats and dogs, rabbits and rats, pigs, deer, and sheep, and of all
other mammalia, possess similar structures. Thus they all pass through a
stage which is found also in the development of reptiles, birds, and
amphibia,--a stage which corresponds to the fish throughout its life.
Unless these facts mean that the great classes of vertebrates have
originated together from the same or closely similar ancestors, they are
unintelligible; for we cannot see why a cat or a chick should have to be
essentially fishlike at any time unless this is so. Comparative anatomy
states as we have learned that the amphibia as a class have evolved from
and have out-developed the fishes, that reptiles have progressed still
higher, and that birds and mammals have originated from reptilian
ancestors along roads that have diverged beyond the immediate parent
class. Because the members of each class have to pass along the same path
trodden by their many varied ancestors, although at express speed, as it
were, the similarity of the earliest stages in their development is
explained, for during these periods they are traversing a path over which
their ancestors passed together.
The places where the developing embryos depart from the common mode show
where the several divisions took leave of one another in their
evolution,--a point that comes out with great clearness when the facts of
mammalian development are broadly compared. The embryos of carnivora and
rodents and hoofed animals are alike in their earlier development, and
their agreement means a community of origin. At a certain point the cat and
dog depart from the common mode, but they remain alike up to a far later
stage than the one in which they are similar to the embryos of rats and
sheep. The rat and squirrel and rabbit, on their part, remain together
until long after they take leave of the carnivora and ungulates; while the
sheep and cattle and pigs have their own branch line, which they follow in
company after leaving the embryos of the other orders. The reasons for
these facts seem to be that the members of the three orders exemplified
have evolved from the same stock, which accounts for their embryonic
similarity for a long time after they collectively come to differ from
amphibia and reptiles, while the members in each order became
differentiated only later, wherefore their embryonic paths coincide for a
longer period. Thus the degree of adult resemblance which indicates the
closeness of relationship corresponds with the degree of embryonic
agreement; that is, the cat and dog are much alike and their modes of
development are essentially the same to the latest stages, while the cat
and horse agree only during the earliest and middle stages, and their lines
diverge before those of the cat and dog on the one hand, or those of the
horse and pig on the other.
* * * * *
The flounder was noted as a variant of the fish theme which seemed to be a
descendant of a symmetrical ancestor because its structural plan was like
that of other bony fishes. If this be true, and if in its development a
flounder must review its mode of evolution as a species, the young fish
ought to be symmetrical; and it actually is. The grotesque skate and
hammerhead shark were demonstrated to be derivatives of a simpler type of
shark; their embryos are practically indistinguishable from those of
ordinary dogfish and sharks.
Among the insects many examples occur that are already familiar to every
one. The egg of a common house-fly hatches into a larva called a maggot;
in this condition the body destined to become the vastly different fly is
composed of soft-skinned segments very much alike and also similar to the
joints of a worm. Comparative anatomy demonstrates that the fly and all
other insects have arisen from wormlike ancestors, whose originally
similar segments later differentiated in various ways to become the
diverse segments of adult insects; the embryonic history of flies of
to-day corroborates these assertions, in so far as every individual fly
actually does become a wormlike larva before it changes into the final and
complete adult insect. The other kinds of insects are equally striking in
their life-histories. All beetles, such as the potato bug and June bug,
develop from grubs which, like the maggots of flies, are similar to worms
in numerous respects. Butterflies and moths pass through a caterpillar
stage having even more striking resemblances to worms. All the larv� of
insects are therefore like one another, and like worms also, in certain
fundamental characters of internal and external structure; so the
conclusion that the whole group of insects has arisen by evolution from
more primitive ancestors resembling the worms of to-day is based upon
mutually explanatory details of comparative anatomy and embryology.
* * * * *
Let us now turn back to some of the earlier pages of the embryological
record which we passed over in order that we might translate the later
portions dealing with more familiar and intelligible structures like
gills. Before the egg of the frog becomes an elliptical mass of cells, it
is at one time a double-walled sac enclosing a central cavity; in this
stage it is called a _gastrula_. Tracing back the mode of its formation,
we find that it is produced from a hollow sphere of fewer cells that are
essentially alike; this stage also is so important that the special term
_blastula_ is applied to it. Still earlier, there are fewer cells--128 or
thereabouts, 64, 32, 16, 8, 4, 2, and 1. In other words, the starting
point in the development of the frog is a _single biological unit_; this
divides and its products redivide to constitute the many-celled blastula
and the double-walled gastrula. All the other animals we have mentioned
begin like the frog, as eggs which are single cells and nothing more; they
too pass on to become blastul� and gastrul�, similar to those of the frog
in all essential respects, particularly as regards the nature of the
organs produced by each of the two primary layers, and the mode of their
formation. Does the occurrence of blastul� and gastrul� and one-celled
beginnings mean that the higher animals composed of numerous and much
differentiated cells have evolved in company from two-layered saccular
ancestors which were themselves the descendants of spherical colonies of
like cells, and ultimately of one-celled animals?
* * * * *
III
Few natural objects appeal to the interest and imagination of the student
with more force than the fragments of animals and plants released from the
rocks where they have been entombed for ages. Our lives are so brief that
it is impossible for us to comprehend the full duration of the slow
process which constructed the burial shrouds of these creatures of long
ago. We try to picture the earth and its inhabitants as they were when
lizards were the highest forms of animals, and we wonder how life was
lived in the dense forests of the coal age. Science can never learn all
about the ancient history of the earth and of the organisms of bygone
times; yet it has been able to accomplish much through its endeavors to
reconstruct the past, for its method is one by which sure results can
always be obtained whenever there are definite facts with which it can
work. In our present study of evolution we reach the point when we must
examine the testimony of the rocks, and the results and methods of that
department of knowledge called pal�ontology, which is concerned with
fossils and their interpretation.
No doubt most people feel justified in believing that the whole doctrine
of evolution must stand or fall according to the cogency of the
pal�ontological evidences. Plain common sense says that the owners of
shelly or bony fragments found in the deeply-laid strata of the earth must
have lived countless years ago, and if the evolutionist asserts that
primitive organic forms of ancient times have produced changed descendants
of later times, it would seem that fossil evidence would be supremely and
overwhelmingly important. It is true, of course, that this evidence is
peculiarly significant, because in some ways it is more direct than that
of the other categories already outlined. But it must not be forgotten
that the doctrine is already securely founded upon the basic principles of
anatomy and embryology. Science must treat the data of this category by
different methods and must view them in different ways. Therefore we are
interested in pal�ontology because of the way it tells the story of
evolution in its own words, and because we are justified in expecting that
its account should include a description of some such order of events as
that revealed by the developing embryos of modern organisms and that
demonstrated by the comparative anatomy of the varied species of adult
animals.
With these general results in mind, we must now become acquainted with
such subjects as the interpretation of fossils, the causes for the
incompleteness of the series, the conditions for fossilization, the forces
of geological nature, and other matters that make the fossils themselves
intelligible as scientific evidence.
* * * * *
Many views have been entertained regarding the actual nature of the relics
of antiquity exhumed from the rocks or exposed upon the surface by the
wear and tear of natural agencies. In earliest times such things were
variously considered as curious freaks of geological formation, as sports
of nature, or as the remains of the slain left upon the battle-ground of
mythical Titans. Some of the Greeks supposed that fossils were parts of
animals formed in the bowels of the earth by a process of spontaneous
generation, which had died before they could make their way to the
surface. They were sometimes described as the bones of creatures stranded
upon the dry land by tidal waves, or by some such catastrophe as the
traditional flood of the scriptures. In medieval times, and even in our
own day, some people who have been opposed to the acceptance of any
portion of the doctrine of evolution have actually defended the view that
the things called fossils were never the shells or bones of animals living
in bygone times, but that they only simulate such things and have been
created as such together with the layers of rock from which they may have
been taken. If we employed the same arguments in dealing with the broken
fragments of vases and jewelry taken from the Egyptian tombs or from the
buried ruins of Pompeii, we would have to believe that such pieces were
created as fragments and that they were never portions of complete
objects, just because no one alive to-day has ever seen the perfect vessel
or bracelet fashioned so long ago. Common sense directs us to discard such
a fantastic interpretation in favor of the view that fossils are what they
seem to be--simply relics of creatures that lived when the earth was
younger.
Until this common sense view was adopted there was no science of
pal�ontology. Cuvier was the first great naturalist to devote particular
attention to the mainly unrelated and unverified facts that had been
discovered before his time. He was truly the originator of this branch of
zo�logy, for he brought together the observations of earlier men and
extended his own studies widely and surely, emphasizing particularly the
necessity for noting carefully the geological situation of a fossil in
rocks of an older or later period of formation. His great result was the
demonstration that many groups of animals existed in earlier ages that
seem to have no descendants of the same nature to-day, and also that many
or most of our modern groups are not represented in the earliest formed
sedimentary rocks, although these recent forms possess hard parts which
would surely be present somewhere in these levels if the animals actually
existed in those times. But the meaning of these facts escaped Cuvier's
mind. He was a believer in special creation, like Linn�us and all but a
few among his predecessors, and he explained the diversity of the faunas
of different geological times in what seems to us a very simple and na�ve
way. In the beginning, he held, when the world was created, it was
furnished with a complete set of animals and plants. Then some great
upheaval of nature occurred which overwhelmed and destroyed all living
creatures. The Creator then, in Cuvier's view, proceeded to construct a
new series of animals and plants, which were not identical with those of
the former time, but were created according to the same general working
plans or architectural schemes employed before. Another cataclysm was
supposed to have occurred, which destroyed the second series of organisms
and laid a new covering of rocks over the earth's surface for a subsequent
period of relative quiet; and so the process was continued. By this
account, Cuvier endeavored to reconcile the doctrine of supernatural
creation and intervention with the obvious facts that organisms have
differed at various times in the earth's history. Although he saw that
animals of successive periods displayed similar structures, like the
skeleton of vertebrates, which testified to some connection, Cuvier could
not bring himself to believe that this connection was a genealogical one.
* * * * *
What, now, are the reasons why the pal�ontological evidence is not
complete and why it cannot be? In the first place the seeker after fossil
remains finds about three fifths of the earth's surface under water so
that he cannot explore vast areas of the present ocean beds which were
formerly dry land and the homes of now extinct animals. Thus the field of
investigation is seriously restricted at the outset, but the naturalist
finds his work still more limited, in so far as much of the dry land
itself is not accessible. The perennial snows of the Arctic region render
it impossible to make a thorough search in the frigid zone, and there are
many portions of the temperate and torrid zones that are equally
unapproachable for other reasons. But even where exploration is possible,
the surface rocks are the only ones from which remains can be readily
obtained, for the layers formed in earlier ages are buried so deeply that
their contents must remain forever unknown in their entirety. Only a few
scratches upon the earth's hard crust have been made here and there, so it
is small wonder that the complete series of extinct organisms has not been
produced by the pal�ontologist.
But even if an animal of the past possessed hard structures, it must have
satisfied certain limited conditions to have its remains prove serviceable
to students of to-day. A dead mammal must fall upon ground that has just
the right consistency to receive it; if the soil is too soft, its several
parts will be separated and scattered as readily as though it had fallen
upon hard ground where it would be torn to pieces by carnivorous animals.
The dead body must then be covered up by a blanket of silt or sand like
that which would be deposited as the result of a freshet. If a skeleton is
too greatly broken up or scattered, it may be difficult or even impossible
for its discoverer to piece together the various fragments and assemble
them in their original relations. Very few individuals have been so buried
and preserved as to meet the conditions for the formation of an ideal
fossil. To realize how little may be left of even the most abundant of
higher organisms, we have only to recall that less than a century ago
immense herds of bison and wild horses roamed the Western plains, but very
few of their skulls or other bones remain to be enclosed and fossilized in
future strata of rocks. When we appreciate all these difficulties, both
geological and biological, we begin to see clearly why the ancient lines
of descent cannot be known as we know the path and mode of embryonic
transformation. The wonder is not that the pal�ontological record is
incomplete, but that there is any coherent and decipherable record at all.
Yet in view of the many and varied obstacles that must be surmounted by
the investigator, and the adverse factors which reduce the available
evidence, the rapidly growing body of pal�ontological facts is amply
sufficient for the naturalist to use in formulating definite and
conclusive principles of evolution.
* * * * *
For the purposes of pal�ontology, the most essential data of geology are
those which indicate the relative ages of the strata that make up the hard
outer crust of the earth, for only through them can the order of animal
succession be ascertained. It does not matter exactly how old the earth
may be. While it is possible to determine the approximate length of time
required for the construction of sedimentary rocks like those which
natural agencies are producing to-day, there are few definite facts to
guide speculation as to the mode or duration of the process by which the
first hard crystalline surface of the earth was formed. But pal�ontology
does not care so much about the earliest geological happenings, for it is
concerned with the manifold animal forms that arose and evolved after life
appeared on the globe. Questions as to the way life arose, and as to the
earliest transformations of the materials by which the earth was first
formed are not within the scope of organic evolution, although they relate
to intensely interesting problems for the student of the process of cosmic
evolution.
It seems scarcely credible that the apparently weak forces of nature like
those we have mentioned are sufficiently powerful to work over the massive
crust of the earth as geology says they have. Our attention is caught, as
a rule, only by the greater things, like the earthquakes at San Francisco
and Valparaiso, and the tidal waves and cyclones of the South Seas; but
the results of these sporadic and local cataclysms are far less than the
effects of the persistent everyday forces of erosion, each one of which
seems so small and futile. When we look at the Rocky Mountains with their
high and rugged peaks, it seems almost impossible that rain and frost and
snow could ever break them up and wear them down so that they would become
like the rounded hills of the Appalachian Mountain chain, yet this is what
will happen unless nature's ways suddenly change to something which they
are not now. A visitor to the Grand Ca�on of the Colorado sees a
magnificent chasm over a mile in depth and two hundred miles long which
has actually been carved through layer after layer of solid rock by the
rushing torrents of the river. Perhaps it is easier to estimate the
geological effects of a river in such a case as Niagara. Here we find a
deep gorge below the famous falls, which runs for twenty miles or so to
open out into Lake Ontario. The water passing over the brim of the falls
wears away the edge at a rate which varies somewhat according to the
harder or softer consistency of the rocks, but which, since 1843, has
averaged about 104 inches a year. Knowing this rate, the length of the
gorge, and the character of the rocky walls already carved out, the length
of time necessary for its production can be safely estimated. It is about
30,000 to 40,000 years, not a long period when the whole history of the
earth is taken into account. A similar length of time is indicated for the
recession of the Falls of St. Anthony, of the Mississippi River, an
agreement that is of much interest, for it proves that the two rivers
began to make their respective cuttings when the great ice-sheet receded
to the north at the end of the Glacial epoch.
What has become of the masses washed away during the formation of these
gorges? As gravel and mud and silt the detritus has been carried to the
still waters of the lower levels, to be laid down and later solidified
into sandstone and slate and shale. All over the continents these things
are going on, and indefatigable forces are at work that slowly but surely
shear from the surface almost immeasurable quantities of earth and rock to
be transported far away. In some instances it is possible to find out just
how much effect is produced in a given period of time, especially in the
case of the great river systems. For example, the mass of the fine
particles of mud and silt carried in a given quantity of the water of the
Mississippi as it passes New Orleans can be accurately measured, and a
satisfactory determination can also be made of the total amount of water
carried by in a year. From these figures the amount of materials in
suspension discharged into the Gulf of Mexico becomes known. It is
sufficient to cover one square mile to the depth of 269 feet; in twenty
years it is one cubic mile, or five cubic miles in a century. Turning now
to the other aspect of this process, and the antecedent causes which
produce these effects, it appears that the area of the Mississippi River
basin is 1,147,000 square miles--about one third of the total area of the
United States. Knowing this, and the annual waste from its surface, it is
easy to demonstrate that it will take 6000 years to plane off an average
of one foot of soil and rock from the whole of this immense area. Of
course only an inch or a few inches will be taken from some regions where
the ground is harder or rockier, or where little rain falls, while many
feet will be washed away from other places. The waters of the Hoang-ho
come from about 700,000 square miles of country, from which one foot of
soil is washed away in 1464 years. The Ganges River, draining about
143,000 square miles, carries off a similar depth of eroded materials from
its basin in 823 years! Should we add to the above figures those that
specify the bulk of the chemical substances in solution carried by these
waters, the total would be even greater. We know that in the case of the
Thames River, calcareous substances to the amount of 10,000 tons a year
are carried past London, and all this mineral has been dissolved by
rain-water from the chalky cliffs and uplands of England, so that the land
has become less by this amount. Thus we learn that vast alterations are
being made in the structure of great continents by rain and rivers, as well
as by glaciers and other geological agencies. And at the same time that old
strata are undergoing destruction new ones are in process of construction
at other places, where animal remains can be embedded and preserved as
fossils. The forces at work seem weak, but they continue their operations
through ages that are beyond our comprehension and they accomplish results
of world-building magnitude.
From these and similar facts, the naturalist finds how agencies of the
present construct new rocks and alter the old; and so in the light of this
knowledge, he proceeds with his task of analyzing the remote past,
confident that the same natural forces have done the work of constructing
the lower geological levels because these earlier products are similar to
those being formed to-day. After learning this much, he must immediately
undertake to arrange the strata according to their ages. This might seem a
difficult or even an impossible task, but the rocks themselves provide him
with sure guidance.
Wherever a river has graven its deep way through an area of hard rocks, as
in the case of Niagara, the walls display on their cut surfaces a series
of lines and planes showing that they are superimposed layers formed
serially by deposits that have differed some or much at different times
according to the circumstances controlling the erosion of their
constituent particles. A layer of several feet in thickness may be
composed of compact shale, while above it will be a zone of limestone, and
again above this another layer of shale. Successive strata like these,
where they are parallel and obviously undisturbed, are evidently arranged
in the order of their formation and age. But by far the most impressive
demonstration of the basic principle of geology employed for the
determination of the relative ages of rocks is the mighty Ca�on of the
Colorado. As the traveler stands on the winding rim of this vast chasm,
his eye ranges across 13 miles of space to the opposite walls, which
stretch for scores of miles to the right and left; upon this serried face
he will see zone after zone of yellow and red and gray rock arranged with
mathematical precision and level in the same order as on the steep slopes
beneath him. Plain common sense tells him that the great sheets of rock
stretched continuously at one time between the now separate walls, and
that the various strata of sandstone and limestone were deposited in
successive ages from below upwards in the order of their exposure. When
now he extends his explorations to another state like Utah or Wyoming, he
may find some but not all of the series exhibited in the Grand Ca�on,
overlaid or underlaid by other strata which in their turn can be assigned
to definite places in the sequence. By the same method, the geologist
correlates and arranges the rocks not only of different parts of the same
state, or of neighboring states, but even those of widely separated parts
of North America and of different continents. But he learns that he must
refrain from over-hasty conclusions, for he soon finds that the
sedimentary rocks have not been constructed at the same rate in different
places during one and the same epoch, and that rocks formed even at one
period are not always identical in nature. But his guiding principle is
sensible and reasonable, and by employing it with due caution he provides
the pal�ontologist with the requisite knowledge for his special task,
which is to arrange the extinct animals whose remains are found as fossils
of various earth ages in the order of their succession in time.
__________________________________________________________________________
| | | |
YEARS | NUMBER OF | | | ORDER OF
NECESSARY FOR | FEET IN | GEOLOGICAL | GEOLOGICAL | APPEARANCE OF
FORMATION | THICKNESS | AGE | EPOCH | CHARACTERISTIC
| | | | GROUPS
______________|___________|______________|_______________|________________
| | | |
| | | | M B R A F I
| | | | a i e m i n b
| | | | m r p p s v r
| | Recent | | m d t h h e a
| | or | | a s i i e r t
| | Quaternary | | l l b s t e
| | | | s e i e s
| | | | s a -
______________|___________|______________|_______________|_|_|_|_|_|_|____
| | | | | | | | | |
| | | Pleistocene | | | | | | |
| | Cenozoic | Pliocene | | | | | | |
5,000,000 | 25,000 | or | Miocene | | | | | | |
| | Tertiary | Oligocene | | | | | | |
| | | Eocene | | | | | | |
______________|___________|______________|_______________|_|_|_|_|_|_|____
| | | | | | | | | |
| | Mesozoic | Cretaceous | | | | | | |
4,000,000 | 23,000 | or | Jurassic | | | | | | |
| | Secondary | Triassic | | | | | |
______________|___________|______________|_______________|_____|_|_|_|____
| | | | | | | |
| | | Permian | | | | |
| | Pal�ozoic | Carboniferous | | | |
21,000,000 | 106,000 | or | Devonian | | |
| | Primary | Silurian | | |
| | | Cambrian | | |
______________|___________|______________|_______________|________________
| | | |
20,000,000 | 30,000 | Azoic | Arch�n |
______________|___________|______________|_______________|________________
After what seems an unduly long preparation, we now come to the actual
biological evidence of evolution provided by the results of this division
of zo�logical science. But all of the foregoing is fundamentally part of
this department of knowledge and it is absolutely essential for any one
who desires to understand what the fossils themselves demonstrate.
The oldest sedimentary rocks are devoid of fossil remains and so they are
called the Azoic or Arch�an. They comprise about 30,000 feet of strata
which seem to have required at least 20,000,000 years for their formation.
This period is roughly two-fifths of the whole time necessary for the
formation of _all_ the sedimentary rocks, and this proportion holds true
even if the entire period of years should be taken as 100,000,000 instead
of 50,000,000 or less. The earth during this early age was slowly
organizing in chemical and physical respects so that living matter could
be and indeed was formed out of antecedent substances--but this process
does not concern us here. The important fact is that the second major
period, called the Pal�ozoic, or "age of ancient animals," saw the
evolution of the lowest members of the series,--the invertebrates,--and
the most primitive of the backboned animals, like fishes and amphibia. The
rocks of this long age include about 106,000 feet of strata, demanding
some 21,000,000 or 22,000,000 years for their deposition. Thus it is
proved that the invertebrate animals were succeeded in time by the higher
vertebrates, which is exactly what the evidences of the previous
categories have shown. When we remember that the lower animals are devoid
as a rule of skeletal structures that might be fossilized, and when we
recall the fact that the strata of the pal�ozoic provided the materials
out of which the upper layers were formed afterwards, we can understand
why the ancient members of the invertebrate groups are not known as well
as the later and higher forms like vertebrates. Yet all the fossils of
these relatively unfamiliar creatures clearly prove that no complex animal
appears upon a geological horizon until after some simple type belonging
to a class from which it may have taken its origin; in brief, there are no
anachronisms in the record, which always corresponds with the record
written by comparative anatomy, wherever the facts enable a comparison to
be made.
But the extinct animals of the third and fourth ages are more interesting
to us, because there are more of them and because they are more like the
well-known organisms of our present era. These two ages are called the
Mesozoic or Secondary, and the Cenozoic or Tertiary. The former is so
named because it was a transitional age of animals that are intermediate
in a general way between the primitive forms of the preceding age and
those of the next period; the latter name means the "recent-animal" age,
when evolution produced not only the larger groups of our present animal
series, but also many of the smaller branches of the genealogical tree
like orders and families to which the species of to-day belong.
Following the fishes, the amphibia arose during the coal age or
Carboniferous, usurping the proud position of the lower vertebrate class.
The reptiles then appeared and gained ascendancy over the amphibia, to
become in the Mesozoic age the highest and most varied of the existing
vertebrates. At that time there were the great land dinosaurs with a
length of 80 feet, like _Brontosaurus_; aquatic forms like _Ichthyosaurus_
and _Plesiosaurus_, whose mode of evolution from terrestrial to swimming
habits was like that of seals and penguins of far later eras. Flying
reptiles also evolved, to set an example for the bats of the mammalian
class, for both kinds of flying organisms converted their anterior limbs
into wings, although in different ways.
During the Triassic and Jurassic periods of the Mesozoic age, the first
birds and mammals appeared to follow out their diverging and independent
lines of descent. Pal�ontology makes it possible to trace the origin and
development of many of the different branches that grew out of the
mammalian limb from different places and at different times during the
Mesozoic and the following age, called the Cenozoic, or age of recent
animals. It is unnecessary, however, for us to review more of the details:
the main result is obvious; namely, that the appearance of the great
classes of vertebrates is in the order of comparative anatomy and
embryology. Not only, then, is the fact of evolution rendered trebly sure,
but the general order of events is thrice and independently demonstrated
to be one and the same. Surely we must see that no reasonable explanation
other than evolution can be given for these basic facts and principles.
Since the doctrine of evolution and its evidences began to occupy the
thoughts of the intellectual world at large, no fossil forms have received
more attention than the ancient members of the horse tribe. As we have
learned, a modern horse is described by comparative anatomy as a one-toed
descendant of remote five-toed ancestors. When the hoofed animals of
modern times were reviewed as subjects for comparative anatomical study,
the odd-toed forms arranged themselves in a series beginning with an
animal like an elephant with the full number of five digits on each foot
and ending at the opposite extreme with the horse. A reasonable
interpretation of these facts was that the animals with fewer toes had
evolved from ancestors with five digits, of which the outer ones had
progressively disappeared during successive geological periods, while the
middle one enlarged correspondingly. The facts provided by pal�ontology
sustain this contention with absolutely independent testimony.
Disregarding some problematical five-toed forms like _Phenacodus_, the
first type of undoubted relationship to modern horses is _Hyracotherium_,
a little animal about three feet long that lived during the Eocene period
of the Cenozoic epoch. Its forefeet had four toes each, and its hinder
limbs ended with three toes armed with small hoofs, but one of its
relatives of the same time has a vestige of another digit on the hind
foot. By the geological time mentioned, therefore, the earliest true
horses had already lost some of the toes that their progenitors possessed.
In the Miocene the extinct species, obviously descended from the Eocene
forms, had lost more of their toes; still higher, that is, in the rocks
formed during succeeding periods of time, the animals of this division are
much larger and each of their feet has only three toes, of which the
middle one is the largest while the ones on the sides are small and
withdrawn from the ground so as to appear as useless vestiges. To produce
modern horses and zebras from these nearer ancestors, few additional
changes in the structure of the feet are necessary, for the lateral toes
need only to become a little more reduced and the middle one to enlarge
slightly to give the one-toed limb of modern types, with its splint-like
vestiges still in evidence to show that the ancestor's foot comprised more
of these terminal elements. Comparing the animals of successive periods,
these and other skeletal structures demonstrate that the ancestry of each
group of species is to be found in the animals of the preceding epoch, and
that the whole history of horses is one of natural transformation,--in a
word, of evolution.
No less interesting in their own way are the remains of other hoofed forms
that lead down to the elephants of to-day and to the mammoth and mastodon
of relatively recent geologic times. Common sense would lead to the
conclusion that a form like a modern tapir was the prototype from which
these creatures have arisen, and common sense would lead us to expect that
if any fossils of the ancestors of the modern group of elephants occurred
at all they would be like tapirs. Thus a fossil of much significance in
this connection is _Moeritherium_, whose remains have been found in the
rocks exposed in the Libyan desert, for this creature was practically a
tapir, while at the same time its characters of muzzle and tusk mark it as
very close to the ancestors of the larger woolly elephants of later
geological times, when the trunk had grown considerably and the tusks had
become greatly prolonged. Again the fossil sequence confirms the
conclusions of comparative anatomy, regarding the mode by which certain
modern animals have evolved.
The fossil deer of North America, as well as many other even-toed members
of the group of mammalia possessing hoofs, provide the same kind of
conclusive evidence. The feature of particular interest in the case of
their horns, is a correspondence between the fossil sequence and the order
of events in the life-history of existing species,--that is, between the
results of pal�ontology and of embryology. Horns of the earliest known
fossil deer have only two prongs; in the rocks above are remains of deer
with additional prongs, and point after point is added as the ancient
history of deer is traced upwards through the rocks to modern species. We
know that the life-history of a modern species of animals reviews the
ancestral record of the species, and what happens during the development
of deer can be directly compared with the fossil series. It is a matter of
common knowledge that the year-old stag has simple spikes as horns, and
that these are shed to be replaced the following year by larger forked
horns. Every year the horns are lost and new ones grow out, and become
more and more elaborately branched as time goes on, thus giving a series
of developmental stages that faithfully repeats the general order of
fossil horns. Even Agassiz, who was a believer in special creation and an
opponent of evolution, was constrained to point out many other instances,
mainly among the invertebrata, where there was a like correspondence
between the ontogeny of existing species and their phylogenetic history as
revealed by the fossil remains of their ancestors.
* * * * *
In the last place, we must give more than a passing consideration to some
of the extinct types of animals that occupy the position of "links"
between groups now widely separated by their divergence in evolution from
the same ancestors. Perhaps the most famous example is _Arch�opteryx_
found in a series of slates in Germany. This animal is at once a
feathered, flying reptile, and a primitive bird with countless reptilian
structures. Its short head possesses lizard-like jaws, all of which bear
teeth; its wings comprise five clawed digits; its tail is composed of a
long series of joints or vertebr�, bearing large feathers in pairs; its
breastbone is flat and like a plate, thus resembling that of reptiles and
differing markedly from the great keeled breastbone of modern flying
birds, whose large muscles have necessitated the development of the keel
for purposes of firm attachment. In brief, this animal was close to the
point where reptiles and birds parted company in evolution, and although
it was a primitive bird, it is in a true sense a "missing link" between
reptiles and the group of modern birds. Other fossil forms like
_Hesperornis_ and _Ichthyornis_, whose remains occur in the strata of a
later date, fill in the gap between _Arch�opteryx_ and the birds at the
present time, for among other things they possess teeth which indicate
their origin from forms like _Arch�opteryx_, while in other respects they
are far nearer the birds of later epochs. That these links are not unique
is proved by numerous other examples known to science, such as those which
connect amphibia and reptiles, ancient reptiles and primitive mammals, as
well as those which come between the different orders of certain
vertebrate classes.
In summarizing the foregoing facts, and the larger bodies of evidence that
they exemplify, we learn how surely the testimony of the rocks establishes
evolution in its own way, how it confirms the law of recapitulation
demonstrated by comparative embryology, and how it proves that the greater
and smaller divisions of animals have followed the identical order in
their evolution that the comparative study of the present day animals has
independently described.
* * * * *
The broad and consistent principle underlying these and related facts is
this: _there is a general correspondence between the differences displayed
by the organisms of two regions and the degree of isolation or proximity
of these two areas_. Thus the disconnected but neighboring areas of the
Galapagos Islands and South America support species that resemble each
other closely, for the reasons given before; long isolated areas like
Australia and its surroundings possess peculiar creatures like the
egg-laying mammals, and all of the pouched animals or marsupials with only
one or two exceptions like our own American opossum,--a correlation
between a geological and geographical discontinuity on the one hand and a
peculiarity on the other that reinforces our confidence in the
faunal evolutionary interpretation of the facts of distribution.
It is true that the various classes of animals do not always appear with
coextensive ranges. The barriers between two groups of related species
will not be the same in all cases. A range like the Rocky Mountains will
keep fresh-water fish apart, while birds and mammals can get across
somewhere at some time. All these things must be taken into account in
analyzing the phenomena of distribution, and many factors must be given
due attention; but in all cases the reasons for the particular state of
affairs in geographical and biological respects possess an evolutionary
significance.
Having then all the facts of animal natural history at his disposal, and
the uniform principles in each body of fact that demonstrate evolution, it
is small wonder that the evolutionist seems to dogmatize when he asserts
that descent with adaptive and divergent modification is true for all
species of living things. The case is complete as it stands to-day, while
it is even more significant that every new discovery falls into line with
what is already known, and takes its natural place in the all-inclusive
doctrine of organic evolution. Because this explanation of the
characteristics of the living world is more reasonable than any other,
science teaches that it is true.
IV
The purpose of the discussions up to this point has been to present the
reasons drawn from the principal classes of zo�logical facts for believing
that living things have transformed naturally to become what they now are.
Even if it were possible to make an exhaustive analysis of all of the
known phenomena of animal structure, development, and fossil succession,
the complete bodies of knowledge could not make the evolutionary
explanation more real and evident than it is shown to be by the simple
facts and principles selected to constitute the foregoing outline. We have
dealt solely with the evidences as to the fact of evolution; and now,
having assured ourselves that it is worth while to so do, we may turn to
the intelligible and reasonable evidence found by science which proves
that the familiar and everyday "forces" of nature are competent to bring
about evolution if they have operated in the past as they do to-day.
Investigation has brought to light many of the subsidiary elements of the
whole process, and these are so real and obvious that they are simply
taken for granted without a suspicion on our part of their power until
science directs our attention to them.
For one reason or another, those who take up this subject for the first
time find it difficult to banish from their minds the idea that evolution,
even if it ever took place, has been ended. They think it futile to expect
that a scrutiny of to-day's order can possibly find influences powerful
enough to have any share in the marvelous process of past evolution
demonstrated by science. The naturalists of a century ago held a similar
opinion regarding the earth, viewing it as an immutable and unchanged
product of supernatural creation, until Lyell led them to see that the
world is a plastic mass slowly altering in countless ways. It is no more
true that living things have ceased to evolve than that mountains and
rivers and glaciers are fixed in their final forms; they may seem
everlasting and permanent only because a human life is so brief in
comparison with their full histories. Like the development of a continent
as science describes it, the origin of a new species by evolution, its
rise, culmination, and final extinction may demand thousands of years; so
that an onlooker who is himself only a conscious atom of the turbulent
stream of evolving organic life does not live long enough to observe more
than a small fraction of the whole process. Therefore living species seem
unchanged and unchangeable until a conviction that evolution is true, and
a knowledge of the method of science by which this conviction is borne
upon one, guide the student onwards in the further search for the
efficient causes of the process.
When the subject of inquiry was the reality of evolution, it was perhaps
surprising to find that even the most familiar animals like cats and frogs
provided adequate data for science to use in formulating its principles.
So it is with the matter of method; it is unnecessary to go beyond the
observations of a day or a week of human life to find forces at work, as
real and vital as animal existence and organic life themselves. This is
true, because evolution is true, and because the lives of all creatures
follow one consistent law. Our task is therefore much more simple than
most people suppose it to be; let us look about us and classify what we
may observe, increasing our knowledge from the wide array of equally
natural facts supplied by the biologist.
The analogies of the steamship and the locomotive proved useful at many
times during the discussion of the fact of evolution, and even in the
present connection they will still be of service. The evolution of these
dead machines has been brought about by man, who, as an element of their
environment, has been their creator as well as the director of their
historical transformations. The result of their changes has been greater
efficiency and better adjustment or adaptation to certain requirements
fixed by man himself. The whole process of improvement has been one, in
brief, of trial and error; new inventions have often been worthless, and
they have been relegated to the scrap-heap, while the better part has been
finally incorporated in the type machine. In brief, then, the important
elements in the evolution of these examples have been three; first,
_adaptation_, second, the _origination of new parts_, and third, the
_retention of the better invention_.
* * * * *
At the very outset, when the general characteristics of living things were
considered, much was said on the subject of adaptation as a universal
phenomenon of nature. It was not contended that perfection is attained by
any living mechanism, but it was held that no place exists in nature for
an organism that is incapable of adjusting itself to the manifold
conditions of life. A _modus vivendi_ must be established and some
satisfactory degree of adaptation must be attained, or else an animal or a
species must perish. With this fundamental point as a basis, we look to
nature for two kinds of natural processes or factors, first, those which
may originate variations as _primary factors_,--the counterparts of human
ingenuity and invention in the case of locomotive evolution,--and the
_secondary factors_ of a preservative nature which will perpetuate the
more adaptive organic changes produced by the first influences; it is
clear that the latter are no less essential for evolution than the first
causes for the appearance of variations.
Then there are the variations of a second class, more complex in nature
than the direct effects of environment,--namely, the functional results of
use and disuse. A blacksmith uses his arm muscles more constantly than do
most other men, and his prolonged exercise leads to an increase of his
muscular capacity. All of the several organic systems are capable of
considerable development by judicious exercise, as every one knows. If the
functional modifications through use were unreal, then the routine of the
gymnasium and the schoolroom would leave the body and the mind as they
were before. Furthermore, we are all familiar with the opposite effects of
disuse. Paralysis of an arm results in the cessation of its growth. When a
fall has injured the muscles and nerves of a child's limb, that structure
may fail to keep pace with the growth of the other parts of the body as a
result of its disuse. These are simple examples of a wide range of
phenomena exhibited everywhere by animals and even by the human organism,
demonstrating the plasticity of the organic mechanism and its modification
by functional primary factors of variation.
Thus the first step which is necessary for an evolution and transformation
of organic mechanisms proves to be entirely natural when we give only
passing attention to certain obvious phenomena of life. The fact of
"becoming different" cannot be questioned without indicting our powers of
observation, and we must believe in it on account of its reality, even
though the ultimate analysis of the way variations of different kinds are
produced remains for the future.
Having learned that animals are able to change in various ways, the next
question is whether variations can be transmitted to future generations
through the operation of secondary factors. Long ago Buffon held that the
direct effects of the environment are immediately heritable, although the
mode of this inheritance was not described; it was simply assumed and
taken for granted. Thus the darker color of the skin of tropical human
races would be viewed by Buffon as the cumulative result of the sun's
direct effects. Lamarck laid greater stress upon the indirect or
functional variations due to the factors of use and disuse, and he also
assumed as self-evident that such effects were transmissible as "acquired
characters." This expression has a technical significance, for it refers
to variations that are added during individual life to the whole group of
hereditary qualities that make any animal a particular kind of organism.
If evolution takes place at all, any new kind of organism originating from
a different parental type must truly acquire its new characteristics, but
few indeed of the variations appearing during the lifetime of an animal
owe their origin to the functional and environmental influences, whose
effects only deserve the name of "acquired characters" in the special
biological sense.
* * * * *
The doctrine of natural selection forms the best basis for the detailed
discussion of the way evolution has come about in the past and how it is
going on to-day. This is true because it was the first description of
nature's program to carry conviction to the scientific world, and because
its major elements have stood the test of time as no other doctrine has
done. Much has been added to our knowledge of natural processes during
post-Darwinian times, and new discoveries have supplemented and
strengthened the original doctrine in numerous ways, although they have
corrected certain of the minor details on the basis of fuller
investigation.
* * * * *
Not only do all organisms vary, but they seem to vary in somewhat similar
ways. While modern investigations have thrown much light upon the
relations between variations and their causes, of particular value in the
case of the congenital phenomena, the greatest advance since Darwin's time
consists in the demonstration by the naturalists who have employed the
laborious methods of statistical analysis that the laws according to which
differences occur are the same where-ever the facts have been examined. A
single illustration will suffice to indicate the general nature of this
result. If the men of a large assemblage should group themselves according
to their different heights in inches, we would find that perhaps one half
of them would agree in being between five feet eight inches and five feet
nine inches tall. The next largest groups would be those just below and
above this average class,--namely, the classes of five feet seven to eight
inches and five feet nine to ten inches. Fewer individuals would be in the
groups of five feet five to six inches and five feet ten to eleven inches,
and still smaller numbers would constitute the more extreme groups on
opposite sides of these. If the whole assemblage comprised a sufficient
number of men, it would be found that a class with a given deviation from
the average in one direction would contain about the same number of
individuals as the class at the same distance from the average in the
opposite direction. Taking into account the relative numbers in the
several classes and the various degrees to which they depart from the
average, the mathematician describes the whole phenomenon of variation in
human stature by a concise formula which outlines the so-called "curve of
error." From his study of a thousand men, he can tell how many there would
be in the various classes if he had the measurements of ten thousand
individuals, and how many there would be in the still more extreme classes
of very short and very tall men which might not be represented among one
thousand people.
Whenever any extensive series of like organisms has been studied with
reference to the variations of a particular character, the variations
group themselves so as to be described by identical or similar curves of
error. It is certainly significant that this is true for such diverse
characters, cited at random from the lists of the literature, as the
number of ray-flowers of white daisies, the number of ribs of beech
leaves, and of the bands upon the capsules of poppies, for the shades of
color of human eyes, for the number of spines on the backs of shrimps, and
for the number of days that caterpillars feed before they turn into pup�.
* * * * *
The third element of the process of natural selection is the struggle for
existence which is to a large extent the direct consequence of
over-multiplication. Because nature brings more individuals into existence
than it can support, every animal is involved in many-sided battles with
countless foes, and the victory is sometimes with one and sometimes with
another participant in the conflict. A survivor turns from one vanquished
enemy only to find itself engaged in mortal combat with other attacking
forces. Wherever we look, we find evidence of an unceasing struggle for
life, and an apparently peaceful meadow or pond is often the scene of
fierce battles and tragic death that escape our notice only because the
contending armies are dumb.
The three divisions of the struggle for existence are so important not
only in purely scientific respects, but also in connection with the
analysis of human biology, that we may look a little further into their
details, taking them up in the reverse order. Regarding the environmental
influences, the way that unfavorable surroundings decimate the numbers of
the plants of any one generation has already been noted, and it is typical
of the vital situation everywhere. English sparrows are killed by
prolonged cold and snow as surely as by the hawk. The pond in which
bacteria and protozoa are living may dry up, and these organisms may be
killed by the billion. Even the human species cannot be regarded as exempt
from the necessity of carrying on this kind of natural strife, for scores
and hundreds die every year from freezing and sunstroke and the thirsts of
the desert. Unknown thousands perish at sea from storm and shipwreck,
while the recorded casualties from earthquakes and volcanic eruptions and
tidal waves have numbered nearly one hundred and fifty thousand in the
past twenty-eight years. The effects of inorganic influences upon all
forms of organic life must not be underestimated in view of such facts as
these.
In the second place, the vital struggle includes the battles of every
species with other kinds of living things whose interests are in
opposition. The relations of protozoa and bacteria, conger-eels and other
fish, English sparrows and hawks, plants and herbivorous animals, are
typical examples of the universal conflict in which all organisms are
involved in some way. Again it is only too evident that human beings must
participate every day in some form of warfare with other species. In order
that food may be provided for mankind the lives of countless wild
organisms must be sacrificed in addition to the great numbers of
domesticated animals reared by man only that they may be destroyed. The
wolf and the wildcat and the panther have disappeared from many of our
Eastern states where they formerly lived, while no longer do vast herds of
bison and wild horses roam the Western prairies. Because one or another
human interest was incompatible with the welfare of these animals they
have been driven out by the stronger invaders.
That the victory does not always fall to the human contestant is
tragically demonstrated by the effects of the incessant assaults upon man
made by just one kind of living enemy,--the bacillus of tuberculosis.
Every year more than one hundred and twenty-five thousand people of the
United States die because they are unable to withstand its persistent
attacks; five million Americans now living are doomed to death at the
hands of these executioners, and the figures must be more than doubled to
cover the casualties on the human side in the battles with the regiments
of all the species of bacteria causing disease.
The competition between and among the individuals of one and the same
species is the third part of the struggle for existence, and it is often
unsurpassed in its ferocity. When two lion cubs of the same litter begin
to shift for themselves, they must naturally compete in the same
territory, and their contest is keener than that which involves either of
them and a young lion born ten or fifteen miles away. The seeds of one
parent plant falling in a restricted area will be engaged in a competitive
struggle for existence that is much more intense than many other parts of
nature's warfare. In brief, the intensity of the competition will be
directly proportional to the similarity of two organisms in constitution
and situation, and to the consequent similarity of vital welfare. The
interests of the white man and the Indian ran counter to each other a few
hundred years ago, and the more powerful colonists won. The assumption of
the white man's burden too often demonstrates the natural effect of
diversity of interest, and the domination of the stronger over the weaker.
In any civilized community the manufacturer, farmer, financier, lawyer,
and doctor must struggle to maintain themselves under the conditions of
their total inorganic and social environments; and in so far as the object
of each is to make a living for himself, they are competitors. But the
contest becomes more absorbing when it involves broker and broker, lawyer
and lawyer, financier and magnate, because in each case the contestants
are striving for an identical need of success.
* * * * *
* * * * *
For the reason that the qualities which preserve an animal's existence are
already congenital, they are already transmissible, as Darwin contended.
Since his time much has been learned about the course of inheritance and
its physical basis, and the new discoveries have confirmed the essential
truth of Darwin's statement that the congenital characters only possess a
real power in the evolution of species.
* * * * *
* * * * *
The doctrine of natural selection took form in the mind of Darwin mainly
on account of three potent influences; these were, first, the geological
doctrine of uniformitarianism proposed by Lyell, second, his own
observations of wild life in many lands and his analysis of the breeder's
results with domesticated animals, and third, the writings of Malthus
dealing with overpopulation. As Darwin had read the works of Buffon,
Lamarck, and Erasmus Darwin, his grandfather, who had written a famous
treatise under the title of "Zoonomia," he was familiar with the evidences
known in his student days tending to prove that organic evolution was a
real natural process. Lyell's doctrine of uniform geological history made
an early and deep impression upon his mind, and it led him to ask himself
whether the efficient causes of past evolution might not be revealed by an
analysis of the present workings of nature. As naturalist of the "Beagle"
during its four years' cruise around the world, Darwin saw many new lands
and observed varied circumstances under which the organisms of the tropics
and other regions lived their lives. The fierce struggle for existence
waged by the denizens of the jungle recalled to him the views of Malthus
regarding overpopulation and its results. These and other influences led
him to begin the remarkable series of note-books, from which it is
interesting indeed to learn how the doctrine of natural selection began to
assume a definite and permanent form in his mind, as year followed year,
and evidence was added to evidence. And it is a valuable lesson to the
student of science that for twenty-five years Darwin devoted all his time
to the acquisition of facts before he gave his doctrine to the world in
the famous "Origin of Species."
Darwin was particularly impressed by the way mankind has dealt with the
various species of domesticated animals, and he was the first naturalist
to point out the correspondence between the breeder's method of
"artificial selection," and the world-wide process of natural selection.
As every one knows, the breeder of race horses finds that colts vary much
in their speed; discarding the slower animals, he uses only the swifter
for breeding purposes, and so he perfects one type of horse. With other
objects in view, the heavy draught horse, the spirited hackney, and the
agile polo pony have been severally bred by exactly the same method. Among
cattle many kinds occur, again the products of an artificial or human
selection; hornless breeds have been originated, as well as others with
wide-spreading or sharply curved horns; the Holstein has been bred for an
abundant supply of milk as an object, while Jerseys and Alderneys excel in
the rich quality of their milk. Various kinds of domesticated sheep and
rabbits and cats also owe their existence to the employment of the
selfsame method, unconsciously copied by man from nature; for men have
found variations arising naturally among their domesticated animals, and
they have simply substituted their practical purposes or their fancy for
nature's criterion of adaptive fitness, preserving those that they wish to
perfect and eliminating those unfitted to their requirements or ideas.
In the case of many of these and other examples, wild forms still occur
which seem to be like the ancestral stock from which the domesticated
forms have been produced. All the varied forms of dogs--from mastiff to
toy-terrier, and from greyhound to dachshund and bulldog--find their
prototypes in wild carnivora like the wolf and jackal. In Asia and
Malaysia the jungle fowl still lives, while its domesticated descendants
have altered under human direction to become the diverse strains of the
barnyard, and even the peculiar Japanese product with tail feathers
sometimes as long as twenty feet. That far-reaching changes can be brought
about in a relatively short time is proved by the history of the game
cock, which has nearly doubled in height since 1850, while at the same
time its slender legs, long spurs, and other qualities have been perfected
for the cruel sport for which it has been bred. Again, the wild rock
pigeon seems to be the ancestral form from which the fantail and pouter
and carrier-pigeon with their diverse characters have taken their origin.
* * * * *
The laws of biological inheritance have received close and deep study by
numerous investigators of Darwinian and post-Darwinian times, because from
the first it was clearly recognized that a complete description of
nature's method of accomplishing evolution must show how species maintain
the same general characteristics from generation to generation, and also
how new qualities may be fixed in heredity as species transform in the
course of time. Before our modern era in biology, the fact of inheritance
was accepted as self-sufficient; now much is known that supplements and
extends the incomplete account given by natural selection of the way
evolution takes place.
The researches dealing with the physical basis of inheritance and its
location in the organism have yielded the most striking and brilliant
results. Darwin himself realized that the doctrine of natural selection
was incomplete, as it accepted at its face value the inheritance of
congenital racial qualities without attempting to describe the way an egg
or any other germ bears them, and he endeavored to round out his doctrine
of selection by adding the theory of pangenesis. According to this, every
cell of every tissue and organ of the body produces minute particles
called gemmules, which partake of the characters of the cells that produce
them. The gemmules were supposed to be transported throughout the entire
body, and to congregate in the germ-cells, which in a sense would be
minute editions of the body which bears them, and would then be capable of
producing the same kind of a body. If true, this view would lead to the
acceptance of Lamarck's or even Buffon's doctrine, for changes induced in
any organ by other than congenital factors could be impressed upon the
germ-cell, and would then be transported together with the original
specific characters to future generations. Darwin was indeed a good
Lamarckian.
At first, for many reasons, Weismann's theories did not meet with general
acceptance, but during recent years there has been a marked return to many
of his positions, mainly as the result of further cytological discoveries,
and of the formulation of Mendel's Law and of De Vries's mutation theory.
The first-named law was propounded by Gregor Mendel on the basis of
extensive experiments upon plants conducted during many years, 1860 and
later, in the obscurity of his monastery garden at Altbr�nn, in Austria.
It was rescued from oblivion by De Vries, who found it buried in a mass of
literature and brought it to light when he published his renowned Mutation
Theory in 1901. Mendelian phenomena of inheritance, confirmed and extended
by numerous workers with plants and animals, prove that in many cases
portions of the streams of germ plasm that combine to form the hereditary
content of organisms may retain their individuality during embryonic and
later development, and that they may emerge in their original purity when
the germ-cells destined to form a later generation undergo the preparatory
processes of maturation. They demonstrate also the apparent chance nature
of the phenomena of inheritance. To my mind the most striking and
significant result in this field is the demonstration that a particular
chromosome or chromatin mass determines a particular character of an adult
organism, which is quite a different matter from the reference of all the
hereditary characters to the chromatin as a whole. Wilson and others have
brought forward convincing proof that the complex character of sex in
insects actually resides in or is determined by particular and definite
masses of this wonderful physical basis of inheritance.
Mendel's principles also account in the most remarkable way for many
previously obscure phenomena, like reversion, or a case where a child
resembles its grandparent more than it does either of its parents; such
phenomena are due, so to speak, to the rise to the surface of a hidden
stream of germ plasm that had flowed for one or many generations beneath
its accompanying currents. I believe that the law is replacing more and
more the laws of Galton and Pearson, formulated as statistical summaries
of certain phenomena of human inheritance taken _en masse_. According to
Galton's celebrated law of ancestral inheritance, the qualities of any
organism are determined to the extent of a certain fraction by its two
parents taken together as a "mid-parent," that a smaller definite fraction
is contributed by the grandparents taken together as a mid-grandparent,
and so on to earlier generations. But Mendel's Law has far greater
definiteness, it explains more accurately the cases of alternative
inheritance, and it may be shown to hold for blended and mosaic
inheritance as well.
* * * * *
The teachings of science that relate to the origin and history of the
human species constitute for us the most important part of the whole
doctrine of organic evolution and now, having completely outlined this
doctrine as a general one, we are brought to the point where we must deal
frankly and squarely with the insistent questions arising on all sides as
to the way that mankind is involved in the vast mechanism of nature's
order. These questions have been ignored heretofore, in order that the
natural history of animals in general might be discussed without any
interference on the part of purely human interest and concern. It now
becomes our privilege, and our duty as well, to employ and apply the
principles we have learned in order to understand more completely the
origin of the human body as an organic type, the history of human races,
the development of human faculty and of social institutions, and the
evolution finally of even the highest elements of human life. These are
scientific problems, and if we are to solve them we must employ the now
familiar methods of science which only yield sure results.
For the present, then, the questions relating to the higher aspects of
human life must be put aside, only that they may be taken up at the last.
Social evolution likewise finds its place in a later section, after the
phenomena of mind and mental evolution receive due attention and
description. At the present juncture, the human species presents itself as
a subject for organic analysis and classification, merely as a physical
organism. Just as the study of locomotives must begin with the detailed
structure of machines in the workshop before they can be profitably
understood as working mechanisms, so the physical evolution of mankind
must first be made intelligible before it is possible to prosecute
successfully the studies dealing with the psychology, social relations,
and higher conceptions that seem at first to be the exclusive properties
of our species.
The problems of physical evolution of man and of men fall into two groups.
Those of the first deal with the origin of the human species as a unit,
and its comparative relation to lower organisms, while those of the second
part are concerned with the further evolution of human races that have
come to be different in certain details of structure since the human type
as such arose. In the first part, all men will be assumed to be alike and
the members of a homogeneous species whose fundamental attributes are to
be compared with those of other animals; only afterwards will attention be
directed to the differences, previously ignored, that divide human beings
into well-marked varieties. It must be evident even at this point that the
mode of evolution demonstrated by the first investigation will be likely
to bear some close relation to the methods by which human races have
evolved to their present diverse anatomical situations.
* * * * *
The foregoing classification of the problems concerned with the nature and
origin of the human species renders it possible to restrict the immediate
inquiry to a definite and precise question. It is this: does the evidence
relating to the physical characteristics of our species prove that man is
the product of a supernatural act of creation, or does it show that man's
place in nature has been reached by a gradual process of natural
evolution? In order to obtain an equally precise and definite answer to
this question, referring to the particular case of most concern to us, it
is obvious that the method to be employed is the one which has given us an
understanding of organic evolution as an all-inclusive natural process.
The data must be verified, related, and classified, so that their meaning
may be concisely stated in the form of scientific principles. What are the
facts of human structure, comparatively treated? How does the human body
develop? Does pal�ontology throw any light on the antiquity of man? Do the
rules of nature's order control the lives of men? Our course is now clear;
we shall take up serially the anatomy, embryology, and fossil history of
the human species, in order to see that there is ample proof of the actual
occurrence of evolution, and then, as before, we may look about for the
causes which have produced this result by natural methods.
How does the matter stand when the general structural plan of a human
being is examined? Is it entirely different from everything else? It is a
fact of common knowledge that the human body is supported by a bony axis,
the vertebral column, to which the skull is articulated and to which also
the skeletal framework of the limbs is attached. These characteristics
place man inevitably among the so-called vertebrata; he is certainly not
an invertebrate, nor is the basic structure of his body such that a third
group, outside the invertebrata and vertebrata, can be made to include
only the single type--man.
Passing now to the classes that make up the group of vertebrates, we meet
first the lampreys or cyclostomes without jaws, and the others with jaws,
such as the fishes, amphibia, reptiles, birds, and mammals, each class
distinguished by certain definite characters in addition to the vertebral
column. The fishes have gills and scales; amphibia of to-day are
scaleless, and they are provided with gills when they are young and lungs
as adults; reptiles have scales and lungs; birds are warm-blooded and
feathered; while mammals are warm-blooded and haired. Is the human species
a unique kind of vertebrate, or does it find a place in one of these
classes? The occurrence of hair, of a four-chambered heart which propels
warm blood, of mammary glands, and of other systematic characters marks
this species as a kind of mammal and not as a vertebrate in a section by
itself.
The members of the class mammalia differ much among themselves; and now
that we recognize clearly that man is a mammalian vertebrate, the next
question is whether an order exists to which our type must be assigned, or
whether we have at last reached a point where it is justifiable to
establish an isolated division to contain the human species alone. We are
familiar with many representatives of different mammalian orders and with
the kind of structural characteristics that serve as convenient
distinctions in denoting their relationships. Horses and cattle, sheep,
and goats and pigs resemble one another in many respects besides their
hoofs, and they form one natural order; the well-developed gnawing teeth
of rats and rabbits and squirrels place these forms together in the order
rodentia; the structures adapting their possessors for a flesh-eating and
predatory life unite the tribes of the lion, wolf, bear, and seal, in the
order carnivora. Among these and other orders of mammalia is one to which
the lemurs, monkeys, and apes are assigned, because all these forms agree
in certain structural respects that place them apart from the other
mammalia, in the same way, for example, that the races of white men may be
recognized as a group distinct from the black and red races. But
comparative studies, prosecuted not only by those who have been forced to
adopt the evolutionary interpretation, but also by believers in special
creation like Linn�us and Cuvier and other more modern opponents of
evolution, have shown that the peculiar qualities of this order are shared
by the human species. Indeed, the name of primates was given to this
section by Linn�us himself, because the human body found a place in the
array which begins at the lower extreme with the lemurs and the monkeys
and ends with man at the other end. Again it is found that no separate
order of mammals exists to include only the genus _Homo_.
* * * * *
The comparative study of the human organism as a structural type has now
been narrowed down to a review of the various members of the order of
primates. It is the duty of science to arrange these organisms according
to the minor differences beneath the agreements in major qualities, and to
show how they are related in an order of evolution. It will appear, when
this is done, that the supreme place is given to the human species on
account of four and only four characteristics; these are (1) an entirely
erect posture, (2) greater brain development, (3) the power of articulate
speech, and (4) the power of reason. As we are treating the human body as
a subject for comparative structural study, the third and fourth
characters do not concern us here; but it is well to point out that they
depend entirely upon the second, and that they are the functional
concomitants of the improved type of brain belonging to the highest type.
Two characters remain, and in both cases it is significant that
differences in degree only are to be found by even the closest analysis.
The human brain is the same kind of brain that lower primates possess; its
structure is unique in no general respect. And as regards the
first-mentioned character, comparative anatomy shows, in the first place,
that this also is something differing only in degree, and in the second
place, that it is due directly to the development of the brain. For these
reasons a survey of the various members of the order of primates must deal
largely with the progressive elaboration of the brain and the entailed
effects of this enlargement.
The lemurs are small animals very much like squirrels in their general
form and in their tree-climbing habits. They live now almost exclusively
on the island of Madagascar, but pal�ontology shows that they were more
widely spread at an earlier time. Their teeth are exactly like our own,
except that there is one more premolar on each side of each jaw. The
"fingers" and "toes" bear nails like ours, again with an exception in the
case of the second digits of the hind limbs, which bear claws. The details
of structure that set these animals apart from all the rest of the
primates are too small to deserve comment in the present connection.
Passing to the true anthropoids, or man-like primates and man himself, the
first forms encountered are the little marmosets, which are like the
lemurs in some ways, but in other respects they resemble the familiar
tailed monkeys. They are peculiar in having three premolars and two molars
on either side of both upper and lower jaws, and also in the fact that the
"thumb" is not opposable to the other fingers, while all the digits except
the "great toes" bear claws instead of manlike nails. The proportion of
brain-case and face does not differ much from that in the lemurs and even
lower forms like cats, for the brain has not increased greatly in total
mass, though the cerebrum is more convoluted than in the lower forms.
The true monkeys, or Cebid�, are more interesting, and at the same time
they are much more familiar to every one, as they are the commonest
anthropoids of the menagerie and circus. Their wonderful agility and
sureness in climbing about is partly due to the perfect grasping power of
the lower limb. To all intents and purposes the foot is a hand; the first
toe is shorter than the others, and its free motion is unrestricted as in
the thumb of the hand. These animals usually possess a long tail which
they can use as a prehensile organ, curling it about the branch of a tree
with hand-like ease and grasp. When they run on all fours, they plant the
palms and soles flat upon the ground. The feature of primary importance in
a comparative sense is the advanced structure of the skull. These
anthropoids are much more intelligent than the lower forms, which is a
correlate of their larger and more convoluted brains. The increase in the
total bulk of the brain has wrought considerable change, not only in the
head, but also in the relation of head to the trunk. The cranium, or
brain-case of bone, is relatively larger than the "face," and it bulges
upward so as to lie no longer behind the latter as it does in the lower
mammalia. In consequence of this cranial enlargement, the face and eyes
are swung downward, as it were, so that the line of vision is not straight
ahead, but depressed below the horizontal. In order to look to the front
and to the immediate foreground to which it is progressing or to where its
food or enemies may be, the monkey must bend back its head; if it is
still, it finds greater ease in the upright sitting posture which it
assumes readily and naturally.
The next division, called the Cercopithecid�, includes the baboons of the
Old World. These animals also run upon all fours, and their feet are
handlike as before, but the tail is much reduced. The general appearance
of the head is doglike, and the brain-case arches little more than it does
in the monkeys, but the face projects forward as a long muzzle, with
terminal nostrils close together. In some respects the baboons stand
somewhat away from the line leading from the lower to higher anthropoids;
in other characters they approach the latter, for in the teeth especially
they are identical with the apes and with the human species.
The last form among the apes, the gorilla, is one that brings us to a
realization of our own human physical degeneracy. The animal lives in West
Equatorial Africa, and it is a veritable giant in bulk, though its height
may not exceed five feet six inches. The heavy ridges over the eyes, the
upturned nostrils and triangular nose, place it near to the orang-outang,
but it is superior to that form in its relatively greater brain-box, and
in the fact that its heavy lower jaws do not protrude so greatly. It, too,
is semi-erect, so that the line of the vertebral axis makes an angle with
the plane of the ground of about seventy degrees. Its anterior limbs, or
arms, are again very long and bulky; and like the chimpanzee, it rests its
knuckles upon the ground in walking.
It is a short step further to the human organism, whose brain has become
larger and more complex, with a corresponding advance in the functional
powers of reason and the like that owe their existence to the improved
structural basis. After what has been said earlier regarding the relation
between the erect attitude in walking and the increased size of the
cranial part of the skull as compared with the face, it will not be
difficult to see how inevitably the former is the result of the latter.
Should we get upon the ground upon our hands and knees in the position of
a tailed monkey, the eyes look straight into the ground, for the bulging
cranium has pushed out over the jaws and face so that they lie _under_ the
brain-case instead of in front. A person in this position can bend back
the head so as to look ahead, but the strain is too great for comfort.
Rising to the knees, and lifting the hands from the ground, a feeling of
ease at once succeeds that of tension. In the course of evolution
accomplished primarily by the increase of the higher portions of the
brain, the erect position has been assumed gradually and naturally, and to
maintain it has necessitated many other changes in skeleton and muscles;
for example, the pelvis has broadened to support the intestines, which
bear downwards instead of upon the abdominal walls; a double curve has
arisen in the axis of the vertebral column, giving an easier balance to
the upper part of the body and the head. Countless structures of the human
frame testify to an originally four-footed position and to a rotation of
the longer axis through an angle of ninety degrees, as evolution has
produced the human type.
The conclusion that the human brain has made mankind is thus established
as one of fundamental importance. Proceeding further, we learn that this
organ proves to be essentially the same as the brain of lower primates; it
does not gain its greater size and efficiency by the origination of wholly
new and unique parts, but solely by the further elaboration of the ones
present in lower forms. In a word, it is only a difference in _degree_ and
not in essential _kind_ that separates man from the apes and other
primates. Human nature is animal nature, and human structure is animal
structure, for nowhere can final and absolute differences be found. This
does not mean that no differences appear, for it would be absurd to
contend that man and the apes are identical in every respect; but it does
mean that the resemblances are fundamental and comprehensive, and any
details of dissimilarity are in the degree of complexity only. The supreme
place in nature attained by man is therefore due to progressive evolution
in the nervous system. The other systems have degenerated to a greater or
less degree, but such regressive changes are more than compensated for by
the superior control exerted by the improved brain. In purely physical and
mechanical respects, the human body is a degenerate as compared with a
gorilla; the arm of the latter is more powerful than the lower limb of the
former, while the gorilla's chest is more than twice as broad as the
human, and more than four times as capacious. It is not through superior
physique, but by superior ability to direct the activities of his body,
that man excels in the struggle for existence with the lower animals.
* * * * *
Every human infant is bow-legged at birth, and the natural position of its
curved limbs is like that of the gorilla's, for the soles of the feet are
turned toward one another. Again, the so-called great toe is at first
shorter than the others, and for a time it retains the power of free
movement that indicates a handlike character of the lower limb in the
ancestor. Many savage human races, however, whose feet remain unshod, make
use of the primitive grasping power of the foot which the higher races
lose completely. An Australian and Polynesian can pick up small objects
with the foot very much as we may with the hand.
Let us realize that these curious relics found in so many places in the
framework of man are not unique, and that they are reduced counterparts of
larger and more valuable structures in the ape. Unless evolution is true,
they have absolutely no sensible reasons for existence. Science prefers
the evolutionary explanation of their occurrence because this explanation
is more in harmony with the facts known about other organisms, and it is
more reasonable than any other.
* * * * *
When the full import of this history is realized, and when we look further
into the nature of these preliminary conditions through which the human
organism passes in development, we are forcibly impressed by other facts
than the one to which I have directed your attention, for not only do we
find natural transformation, as in the other mammals, but the embryonic
stages are marvelously similar to the earlier conditions in other mammals.
Not very long before birth the human embryo is strikingly similar to the
embryo of the ape; still earlier, it presents an appearance very like that
of the embryos of other mammals lower in the scale, like the cat and the
rabbit,--forms which comparative anatomy independently holds to be more
remote relatives of the human species. Indeed, as we trace back the still
earlier history, more and more characters are found which are the common
properties of wider and wider arrays of organisms, for at one time the
embryo exhibits gill-slits in the sides of its throat which in all
essential respects are just like those of the embryos of birds and
reptiles and amphibia, as well as of other embryo mammals and these
gill-slits are furthermore like those of the fishes which use them
throughout life. All the other organic systems exhibit everywhere the
common characteristics in which the embryos of the so-called higher animals
agree with one another and with the adult forms among lower creatures; the
human embryo possesses a fishlike heart and brain and primitive backbone,
fishlike muscles and alimentary tract. Can we reasonably regard these
resemblances as indications of anything else but a community of ancestry
of the forms that exhibit them?
Yet a still more wonderful fact is revealed by the study of the very
earliest stages of individual development. The human embryo begins its
very existence as a single cell,--nothing more and nothing less; in
general structure the human egg, like the eggs of all other many-celled
organisms, is just one of the unitary building blocks of the entire
organic world. And yet the egg may ultimately become the adult man. Does
this mean that man and all the other higher forms have evolved from
protozoa in the course of long ages? Science asks if it can mean anything
else. When the comparative anatomist bids us look upon the wide and varied
series of adult animals lower than man as his relatives, because they
display similar structural plans beneath their minor differences, it may
be difficult at first to obey him. But in the brief time necessary for the
human egg to develop into an adult, the entire range is compassed from the
single cell to the highest adult we know. There are no breaks in the
series of embryonic stages like those between the diverse adult animals of
the comparative array. I do not think we could ask nature for more
complete proof that human beings have evolved from one-cell ancestors as
simple as modern protozoa beyond the obvious facts of human transformation
during development. They at least are real and not the logical deductions
of reason; yet their very reality and familiarity render us blind to the
deeper meaning revealed to us only when science places the facts in
intelligible order.
* * * * *
And now, in the third place, we may look to nature for fossil evidence
regarding the ancestry of our species. Much is known about the remains of
many kinds of men who lived in prehistoric times, but we need consider
here only one form which lived long before the glacial period in the
so-called Tertiary times. In 1894 a scientist named Dubois discovered in
Java some of the remains of an animal which was partly ape and partly man.
So well did these remains exhibit the characters of Haeckel's hypothetical
ape-man, _Pithecanthropus_, that the name fitted the creature like a
glove. Specifically, the cranium presents an arch which is intermediate
between that of the average ape and of the lowest human beings. It
possessed protruding brows like those of the gorilla. The estimated brain
capacity was about one thousand cubic centimeters, four hundred more than
that of any known ape, and much less than the average of the lower human
races. Even without other characters, these would indicate that the animal
was actually a "missing link" in the scientific sense,--that is, a form
which is near the common progenitors of the modern species of apes and of
man. We would not expect to find a missing link that was actually
intermediate in all respects between modern apes and modern men, any more
than we should look for actual connecting bands of tissue between any two
leaves upon a tree. A missing link, in the true sense, is like a bud of
earlier years which stood near the point from which two twigs of the
present day now diverge. So _Pithecanthropus_ is a part of the chain
leading to man, not far from the place where the human line sprang from a
lower primate ancestor.
* * * * *
The unity of nature and of its processes is established more and more
surely as the naturalist classifies the facts of structure, development,
fossil history, and evolutionary method. Our own species is not unique; it
takes its high place among other organic forms whose lives are controlled
in every way by the uniform consistent laws of the world.
* * * * *
The physical evolution of human races is the next major division of the
large subject before us. Heretofore the obvious differences displayed by
various races have been disregarded and the species has been treated as a
unit, in order that its evolution from pre-human ancestors might be made
clear. Knowing now how the facts of structure show that the supreme
position of our kind has been attained mainly as the result of the
progressive elaboration of the higher portions of the brain, and not
because new and unique structures have been developed, we are prepared to
turn our attention to the diverse characteristics of human races; and
during this inquiry anatomical matters will still be the only ones to be
reviewed. The intellectual and social characters of numerous races belong
to the category of physiological or functional phenomena, which are to
receive due consideration at a later time. It is the meaning of the facts
of racial diversity for which we are now to look.
* * * * *
* * * * *
The average stature of adults varies in different races from four feet one
inch in certain blacks to nearly six feet and seven inches, as among the
Patagonians. These are the extreme values for normal averages, although
dwarfs only fifteen inches high have been known, while "giants" sometimes
occur with a height of nine feet and five inches. Such individuals are of
course rare and abnormal, and are not to be taken into account in
establishing the average stature of a race for use in comparison with that
of another group.
Perhaps the most conservative and most reliable character that serves for
the broad classification of the human races is the shape of the individual
hairs of the head. We are familiar with the straight lank hair of the
Mongolian peoples and of the various tribes of American Indians, in whom
the hair possesses these peculiarities because each element grows as a
nearly perfect cylinder from the cells of the skin at the bottom of a tiny
pit or hair-follicle. The familiar wavy hair of white men owes its
character to the fact that the individual elements are formed by the skin,
not as pencil-like rods, but as flattened cylinders. They are oval or
elliptical in cross-section, and when they emerge from the skin they grow
into a long spiral. If, now, the hair is formed as a very much flattened
rod about one-half as wide in one diameter as in the other, it curls into
a very tight close spiral and gives the frizzly or woolly head-covering of
the Papuan and of the Negro.
In the next place, the shape of the cranium is a character of much value.
This is determined as the proportion between the transverse diameter of
the skull above the ears to the long diameter, namely, the line that runs
from the middle of the brow to the most posterior point of the skull. In
the so-called "long-headed" or dolichocephalic races, the proportion is
seventy-five to one hundred, while in those forms that have more rounded
or brachycephalic heads, like the Polynesian and the black pygmy, the
relation is eighty-three to one hundred. The cranial capacity again varies
considerably, from nine hundred cubic centimeters to twenty-two hundred
cubic centimeters. Many striking variations are also found in the
projection of the jaws. A line drawn from the lower end of the nose to the
chin makes a certain angle with the line drawn from the chin to the
posterior end of the lower jaw; if the jaw projects very greatly, this
angle will be much less than when they do not. In most of the Caucasian
peoples, the lines meet at an angle of eighty-nine degrees, or very nearly
a right angle, but in some of the lower races the figure may be only
fifty-one degrees. Additional characters of the teeth and of the palate
are also taken into account, and have proved their utility. Finally, the
nose exhibits a wide range of variation from the small delicate feature of
the Chinaman to the large, well-arched nose of the Indian. It may be
hollowed out at the bridge instead of arched; again, it may be nearly an
equilateral triangle in outline, as in the Veddahs, and the nostrils may
open somewhat forward instead of downward. As many as fifteen distinct
varieties of the human nose have been catalogued by Bertillon.
These are the principal bodily characters which the anthropologist uses to
distinguish races and by their means to determine the more immediate or
remote community of origin of comparable types. Many of these
characteristics, as indeed we may already see, are decidedly important in
connection with the second problem specified above, for in the case of the
flat triangular nose and projecting jaws of a low negroid we may discern
clear resemblances to certain features of the apes.
* * * * *
Long before the doctrine of evolution was understood and adopted, students
of the human races had been deeply impressed by their natural
resemblances. As early as 1672 Bernier divided human beings according to
certain of these fundamental similarities into four groups; namely, the
white European, the black African, the yellow Asiatic, and the Laplander.
Linn�us, in the eighteenth century, included _Homo sapiens_ in his list of
species, recognizing four subspecies in the European, Asiatic, African,
and Indian of America. Blumenbach in 1775 added the Malay, thus giving the
five types that most of us learned in our school days. But the different
varieties of men recognized by these observers were believed to be created
in their modern forms and with their present-day characteristics; the
common character of skin color exhibited by any group of peoples of a
single continent was to them only a convenient label for purposes of
description and classification. It was not until years later that
fundamental resemblances were recognized as indicating an actual blood
relationship of the races displaying them, and therefore of evolution.
Since the doctrine of human descent and of the divergence of human races
in later evolution has been accepted, those who have attempted to work out
fully the complete ancestry of different peoples have found that no single
character can be taken by itself, while the various criteria themselves
differ in reliability; the color of the skin is not so sure a guide as the
character of the hair and skull, wherefore the classifications of recent
times, notably those of Huxley and Haeckel, have been based largely upon
the latter. The latest systems have been more rigidly scientific and more
in accord with the most modern conceptions of organic relationships in
general, as evidenced by the thoroughgoing methods of Duckworth in his
recent treatise on human classification.
The facts that are available indicate that the first members of our
species evolved in an equatorial continent which is now submerged, and
which occupied a position between the present continents of Asia and
Africa. From this center hordes of primitive men migrated to distant
centers where they differentiated into three primary and distinct groups.
The first of these was gradually resolved into the darker-skinned peoples
most of whom now live in the continent of Africa, although many dwell also
in the islands of the western Pacific Ocean. The second branch divided
almost immediately to produce, on the one hand, the Indians of the new
world and, on the other, the yellow-skinned inhabitants of Asia and other
places. The third branch developed as such in the neighborhood of the
Mediterranean Sea, and produced the series of so-called Caucasian peoples,
which are by far the most familiar to us and to which most of us belong.
But so early did the second branch divide that there are virtually four
main divisions of the human species that are to be examined in serial
order.
It is best to begin with our own division, because its greater familiarity
makes it easier to become acquainted with the methods and results of
anthropology, on the basis of facts that we already know. Three
subordinate types exist, located primarily in northern, central, and
southern Europe respectively, but many other races dwell elsewhere that
are assignable to one or another of these subdivisions. In northeastern
Europe we find people such as the Norwegians, Swedes, Danes, and north
Germans, that average five feet eight inches in height. They have the
long, wavy, and soft hair which is a general characteristic of the whole
Caucasian group, although its light flaxen color is distinctive. The blue
eye and florid complexion accompany the light color of the hair. The skull
is of the longer type, the jaws and forehead are straight and square, the
nose is large and long without a distinct arch, and the teeth are
relatively small. It is not so well known that the Scandinavian type is so
closely copied by many people of Asia, such as the western Persians,
Afghans, and certain of the Hindus, living in a continent that we are
inclined to assign to the Mongol only. In the possession of these
characters the Northern Europeans and other races specified display
evidences of their common ancestry and evolution quite as conclusively as
in the case of the cats discussed in an earlier chapter where the meaning
of essential likeness was first demonstrated.
A broad zone may be drawn from Wales, across Europe and Asia, and even to
the eastern islands of the South Seas, in which we find peoples that are
obviously of Caucasian descent, but they differ from the members of the
first group in some details of structure. On the average they are about
five feet five or six inches in height, the hair is dark and wavy, but it
is not the pencil-like structure of the Mongol. The complexion is pale,
the skull is rounder, and the eyes are usually brown in color. These
peoples agree also in their volatile temperament and vivacious manner and
are thus markedly different from the more stolid northerners. To this
minor branch of the Caucasian stock belong the Welsh, most of the French,
South Germans and Swiss, Russians and Poles, Armenians, eastern Persians,
and finally some of the inhabitants of Polynesia. The last, it is true,
form a well-marked group of darker-skinned and taller races, but in spite
of the admixture of these and other unusual features, we can still discern
the bodily characters that supplement their traditions, telling of an
Asian origin, in demonstrating their common ancestry with round-headed
Persians and middle Europeans. Below the zone of middle Europe and Asia is
another broad region inhabited by the "Mediterranean" type of Caucasian.
The Spaniard, Italian, Greek, and Arab are sufficiently familiar to
illustrate the distinctive qualities of this subdivision. These people
have the smaller stature, dark hair, dark eyes, and paler skin of the
middle Europeans, but the skull is of the long instead of the rounded
type. A well-marked subordinate group is formed by the so-called Semitic
peoples, such as the Arabs and their Hebrew relatives. The Berbers and
other North African races possess a darker skin probably because of the
admixture of Ethiopian stock, and they, too, are so well characterized
that they form a clearly marked outlying group as the so-called Hamites.
Passing over into Asia we find relatives of the Mediterranean man in the
Dravidas and Todas of India, possibly in the degenerate Veddahs of Ceylon,
and finally in the Ainus or "hairy men" of some of the Japanese islands.
The last-named people certainly possess some Mongolian features, but these
seem to have been added to a more fundamental form of body that is
distinctly Caucasian.
All of the races we have mentioned, together with their relatives, may be
compared to the leaves borne upon three branches that take their origin
from a single limb of the widespread human part of the tree. They cannot
be classified in any mode on the basis of their primary and secondary
resemblances without employing the treelike plan of arrangement, which to
the man of science is a sure indication of their evolutionary
relationships.
* * * * *
Turning now to the southern Mongol, we find that from their cradle in the
Tibetan plateau they too have spread widely, and their descendants have
also come to differ in certain respects as they have established
themselves in other lands. Most of the present people of Tibet belong to
this section; the Gurkhas of Hindustan, the people of Burma proper, of
Annam, and Cochin China are close relatives of one another and of the more
characteristic Mongolians of China proper who make up the vast bulk of the
population. From this stock we may also derive the Malays of Sumatra and
Java, of Borneo and Celebes, and the Tagals and Bisayans of the Philippine
Islands. Even the Hovars and other tribes of Madagascar may be referred to
this division, for although in them the skin has become somewhat darker,
we may still discern the characteristics which indicate their common
ancestry with the Oceanic Mongols.
* * * * *
The American Indians taken collectively constitute a group that is well
set off from the rest of mankind by such characters as taller stature,
small, straight, and black eyes, a large nose that is usually bridged or
aquiline, a skull of medium roundness, and the yellow copper color of the
skin. The common origin with the Mongols is demonstrated by the straight
and long, coarse, black hair and by the absence of a beard; the mustache
also is almost always absent.
All of us have seen Indians belonging to the tribes of the plains, which
serve as excellent examples of this grand division. Many have also visited
the homes of the Pueblo Indians, and have learned how uniform is the
physical appearance of the tribes living in various parts of the United
States. Indeed throughout all of North America the basic characteristics
of Indians prove to be strikingly conservative, although in the Eskimo
there are some departures which seem to indicate a closer connection of
these peoples with the Mongols, probably as the result of some more recent
influx from the neighboring and not very distant region of northeastern
Siberia. Extending our survey southward through Central America, the
Aztecs and Mayas are found to possess many of the same characters, though
in some respects they are transitional to the Caribs of the northern edge
of South America and to the Indians of South America. Traveling still
farther southward, we meet the very tall Patagonian, still an Indian in
essential respects, and finally, the Yahgan and Alacaluf of the Fuegian
region, the most degenerate members of the race. The last-mentioned people
are dull and brutish and most degraded in all respects, and stand at the
lowest end of the red Indian series as regards intellectual ability and
cultural attainment.
* * * * *
We now come to the last of the four great divisions of the human species
which includes the races usually spoken of as Africans or Ethiopians. But
these races are by no means restricted to the continent of Africa, for
quite as typical black types are found in far-distant lands such as
Australia and many islands of the Pacific Ocean. The races assigned to
this division group themselves about two subordinate types,--the tall
negro proper and the shorter or dwarf negrito,--and each of these has
representatives both in Africa and in the oceanic territory.
The black slaves of America were all descended from typical negros brought
from the western part of Africa, and they provide us with adequate
illustrations of Ethiopians as a group. In them the stature is above the
average of men in general, specifically about five feet ten inches. The
short jet-black hair is strikingly different from the head covering of the
other great groups of human races; each individual hair is so flat in
cross-section that it curls into a very tight close spiral, and this
brings about a frizzly appearance of the whole head covering. There is
little or no beard, the skin is soft and velvety and of various shades
approaching black in color. The skull is long, the cheek bones are small,
but the most distinctive characteristics of the head are found in the
apelike ridges over the eyes and in the very broad flat nose which
projects only slightly and turns up so that the nostrils open forward to a
marked degree, while in the jaws there is an astonishing divergence from
the Caucasian condition in the great protrusion which causes the angle at
the chin to be about sixty degrees.
The warlike Zulus and other peoples of Southern and Central Africa are
perhaps the most characteristic races in this division. Their relatives
are found to the northward as far as the Sahara desert, along the southern
borders of which they have spread out to the eastward and westward. Fusion
with other races has taken place along this border so that many of these
northern tribes are much lighter than the Zulus in the color of the skin.
But many relatives of the taller African negro are found in other parts of
the world, namely in Australia, and in New Hebrides and New
Caledonia--islands to the north and east of this continent. The Papuan of
New Guinea is a typical negro in all true respects, with strongly marked
Ethiopian characteristics, though there are some differences which are
transitional to the more aberrant natives of Melanesia, which includes
many archipelagos like the Fiji, Bismarck, Marshall, and Solomon islands.
Undoubtedly the most degenerate member of the tall negro division is the
Australian native, the so-called "blackfellow." The bulbous nose and the
well-grown beard mark him off from the typical stock, but his obvious
relationship to this is indicated by the low brain capacity, the prominent
ridges over the eyes, and the heavy projecting jaws.
* * * * *
The second principle is perhaps even more significant: when we review the
many races from the Caucasian to the dwarf Negrito, we traverse a downward
path which will bring us inevitably to the higher apes. In our survey of
human races, we have passed from the Caucasian, with the largest brain and
cranium and with straight jaws well underneath the brain-case, to the
pygmy with a relatively small brain, with huge projecting jaws and with
prominent ridges over the eyes; one step more along that path would bring
us to the gorilla or the chimpanzee. The array of lower primates, from the
lemur to the gorilla, gives a series of forms exhibiting a progressive
advance in respect to the size of the brain and cranium, and a gradual
retreat of the jaws to a position underneath the cranium; and one step
further brings us to man. In a word, these two lines join--in fact, they
are directly continuous. There is a far smaller difference between the
lowest man and the highest ape than we have been accustomed to suppose.
VI
The problems dealing with the make-up of the human mind and with the
evidences of mental evolution bring the student to matters of more vivid
human interest. Mental phenomena are so complex and intricate that it is
well-nigh impossible to analyze their history without a knowledge of the
principles derived from the broad study of evolution as a general
doctrine, where human prejudice is not so large a factor and where his
perspective is less affected by the proximity of the observer to his
facts. For these and other reasons the foregoing treatment of human
evolution has been confined to the purely structural characteristics of
man as a species and of human races as so many varieties of this type.
When the broad comparative methods of biological science are employed for
the elucidation of human anatomical facts, the result in this special
case, like that established through the study of the characteristics of
living things in general, is the proof that evolution gives the most
rational and natural explanation of the observed data. This being true,
the naturalist who turns from purely structural matters to human intellect
and its history, finds well-tried methods of inquiry already available,
and he approaches his further studies with a conviction that evolution,
having proved to be universal so far, in all probability will be found
equally true in the case of psychological phenomena. This expectation is
indeed realized, and the scope of the doctrine is extended over a new
field, when the facts of human psychology are treated as materials for
impersonal comparative study; and this result is not only useful and
valuable in and by itself, but it also provides in the principles of
mental evolution the transition to the field of social relations and
ethical ideas and ideals which are apparently the unique possessions of
men as individuals and as associated groups.
* * * * *
So it is with the nervous systems of man and other animals, and with their
functions. The nervous system of the human organism comprises identical
organs with the same arrangements that are found in other primates and in
lower vertebrates as well; the differences in structure are differences in
the degree of the complexity of certain parts, notably of the cerebrum.
Therefore the evolution of human mentality, which depends upon a human
type of brain as a physical basis, is already demonstrated with the proof
that the human brain and nervous system have evolved. It is true that an
invariable and necessary connection between mind and matter is implied in
the foregoing statement, and this is something which demands further
consideration at a later point. But just _how_ the human mind is produced
by or depends upon the brain, is of far less importance for us at this
time than the obvious fact that mental performance requires active nervous
tissues. So far investigation has been unable to discover a valid reason
for a belief in the existence of mental phenomena, as such, apart from
some kind of material basis. And while we may prefer to restrict the use
of the word _mind_ to the series of nervous processes going on in the
human organ of thought, in so far as these processes are carried on by the
peculiar tissues of the nervous system they cannot be finally
distinguished from the functional products or accompaniments of the same
kind of active tissues and organs in lower creatures. Thus the subject of
mental evolution becomes much clarified at the outset by understanding
that nervous processes and nervous systems evolve together.
* * * * *
When the operations of human mental life are examined, they include what
are called processes of _reason_ as apparently distinctive elements. The
lower mammalia exhibit a simpler order of "mentality" denoted
_intelligence_, while the nervous processes of still simpler forms are
called _instinctive_ and _reflex_ activities. These are the terms of the
comparative array of psychology which are to be separately examined and
classified, and to be brought into an evolutionary sequence if
common-sense directs us to do so.
Let us begin our comparative study with an example of the simplest animals
that consist of only a single cell, such as the little protozoon
_Amoeba_. We have become familiar with this organism as one that carries
on all of the vital functions within the limits of a single structural
unit; it is a mass of protoplasm enclosing a nucleus, and as a biological
individual it must perform all of the eight tasks that are essential for
life. It does not possess a digestive tract, but it does digest; it does
not have breathing organs, but it does respire; and it is particularly
noteworthy that it must coordinate the different activities of its parts,
and maintain definite relations with the environment, even though its
coordination and sensation are not accomplished by any special parts that
would deserve the name of elementary nervous organs. Its many activities
are simple responses to stimuli that reach it from without, and its
reactions to such stimuli are called reflex processes. Should the light
become too strong, it will slowly crawl to a shady place; should the water
in which it lives become warmer, it responds by displaying greater
activity. It exhibits, in a word, the property of _irritability_--that is,
simply the power of receiving and reacting to stimuli; and being only a
single cell this property is held in common by all of its parts.
Passing to the jointed animals like worms and insects, we find nervous
mechanisms that are still more intricate, and with their advance in
structural respects there is a corresponding and correlated progress in
their functions. Because the whole organism has developed more highly
differentiated groups of organs to perform the several biological tasks,
such as eating and respiring and moving, it is necessary for the nervous
structures concerned with the direction of these actions to become more
efficient. An earthworm avoids the light of day and digs its burrow and
seeks its food by wonderfully co�rdinated activities of its muscles and
other parts, which are controlled by a double chain of ganglia along its
ventral side, connected with a similar pair of grouped nerve-cells above
the anterior part of the digestive tract. The ganglia of each segment
exercise immediate supervision over the structures of their respective
territory, while they pass on impulses to other ganglia so that movements
involving many segments can be properly adjusted. Everything an earthworm
does is controlled by the cells grouped in these ganglia, or scattered
along the intervening connecting cords. We speak of its acts as
instinctive, employing a term which seems to indicate a different kind of
operation carried on by the nervous system, but a moment's thought will
show that an instinctive act is simply a complex group of reflex acts. The
physical basis and ultimate unit is a cell, and the functional unit is
likewise a cell act; therefore the seeming difference proves to be one
merely of degree and not of kind. The greater complexity of the worm's
nervous system as compared with that of _Hydra_ gives to the whole
mechanism a plasticity that diverts the attention from the mechanical
nature of the entire instinctive act and of its basic cell elements.
The lower orders of psychological processes play a far larger part in the
lives of the higher animals than we are wont to believe. A pointer and
sheep dog possess different qualifications in the way of instincts that
make them useful to man in different ways. A bulldog or a game-cock does
not reason out its course of action during a contest, but like a mechanism
when the spring is released, it acts promptly and with effect. A ball
flashing past the human eye causes the lids to close unconsciously, and it
is not always possible to inhibit this instinctive mechanical act by the
exercise of the will. An examination of the workings of the human body
reveals manifold activities of an even lower or reflex nature, like the
movements of the viscera and the adjustments in respect to the amount of
supplies of blood sent to different parts of the body as local needs
arise. Directed always by specific portions of the nervous system, such
reflex actions play their part in human life without any effort on the
part of reason and so-called will, and without coming into consciousness
except indirectly and subsequently.
The apes are of the greatest value in providing the transition from the
grade of intelligence to the human level where reason is found. Whether or
not a chimpanzee can reason at all is less important than the fact that
its total "mental" powers are lower than those of man, and higher than
those of inferior mammalia. Apes are far more susceptible to training than
cats and dogs, because their improved nervous mechanism enables them to
establish a psychological sequence with greater facility. If we are to
judge by the facts at hand, these creatures possess a low order of
mentality, like, but by no means equivalent to, that of man.
At the end of the comparative scale, we reach the human mind which is
characterized by its ability to perceive and recognize far wider relations
than those which are involved in intelligence. Human consciousness is the
stream of thoughts and feelings which constitute the immediate contents of
mind. In our own case, we know both the activities we perform and some of
the internal phenomena with which such activities are connected. Then we
are impelled to compare the objective phenomena of action with the
behavior of other men and of lower organisms, and if their behavior does
not coincide with our own we are justified in believing that its direction
lacks some of the elements we know about in our own case. This is the
method of comparative psychology, which establishes the conclusion that
reason is the more complex term of a series to which reflex action,
instinct, and intelligence directly lead.
* * * * *
But the fact remains that the inhabitants of similar countries have
reached markedly different grades of intellectual and cultural life.
Anglo-Saxon dominance must be referred ultimately to Anglo-Saxon heredity
and not to the peculiarities of the land. Although adaptation is no less
necessary for men as individuals and as social groups than it is for all
other living things, I believe that it is to diversity in constitutional
endowments, however these may have arisen, that we must attribute the
superiority of some races over others. The question is not whether a
savage race can or cannot adopt the higher conceptions of a civilized
people; the fact is that they have not actually become civilized by
themselves. Thus, while evolution in mental respects has not resulted in
the loss of plasticity in the case of the brain and the nervous system as
a whole, wherefore the activities of these organs still remain capable of
individual and racial modifications that are impossible in the case of the
skeleton and in the color and shape of the eye, it remains true that races
do differ intellectually, and that their differences are marks of a mental
evolution quite as definite as their physical natural histories of change.
* * * * *
In my own view the strongest and most impressive evidence bearing upon the
great problem before us is provided by the series of transformations by
which the human intellect develops during an individual life. Mind has an
embryology no less significant than that of the skull or of any other
element of the body; and its investigation leads to the evolutionary
interpretation quite as surely as the study of the various grades of adult
psychology constituting the anatomical sequence, which we have reviewed
previously. When in the earlier part of the book we dealt with embryology
in general, we learned how the changes which take place when an organism
develops from an egg demonstrate the actuality of true organic
transformation without the necessity of concluding or inferring that this
process might occur. It is not superfluous to insist again that the
essential fact in evolution is the alteration of one organic
characteristic into another type; must we not recognize at the very outset
that mental transformation is as real as physical development?
In the first instance we might concern ourselves with the physical basis
of mind and its history. In the earliest stages of human embryology no
nervous system whatsoever is present, and it is unreasonable to suppose
that there is anything going on which corresponds to human thought. A
little later a cellular tube is established as a primitive nerve axis,
which at first is nearly uniform throughout its entire length and displays
no differentiation into brain and spinal cord. Before long an enlargement
of the anterior end expands and develops into a primitive three-parted
brain. It is not yet a real brain, however, and it is entirely incapable
of functioning in such a way as to justify the use of the word _mental_
for the results of its operations. We know that it is only in the cerebral
hemisphere of the adult brain that the processes of true human
consciousness go on. But it is not until long after the three-parted stage
that the cerebral hemispheres make their appearance therefore we cannot
speak of mind as present when the cell and tissue basis of mind is not
present. When, now, the cerebral hemispheres do appear, they are small
bean-shaped structures no larger relatively than those of a fish. Later
they enlarge so as to attain the relative size of the cerebral hemispheres
of an amphibian, and still later they are like those of a reptilian brain.
Continuing to enlarge, they begin to fold so that the total surface is
increased without very much addition to their bulk. At this time the
cerebral hemispheres of the brain of the human embryo are like those of an
adult cat or dog. The process of general enlargement and of progressive
convolution are continued, and stages are reached and passed which
correspond with the monkey and ape conditions.
The sounds that make up spoken words can be resolved into a single element
with its modifications; this basic element is the brute-like call or shout
made with the mouth and throat opened wide--a sound we may have heard
uttered by men under the stress of pain or terror. All of the various
vowels are simply modifications of this element by altering the shape of
the mouth cavity and orifice, while the consonants are produced by
interrupting the sound-waves with the palate or lips or tongue. Like the
cell as a unit of structure throughout the organic world, this elemental
utterance proves to be the basic unit of all human languages, which vary
so widely among races of to-day no less than they have in the history of
any single people.
One of the first steps in the making of spoken words was taken by human
beings when they imitated the calls or other sounds produced by living
things, and tacitly agreed to recognize the imitation as a symbol of the
creature making it. Thus the names for the cuckoo and the crow in many
languages besides our own are simply copies of the calls uttered by these
birds; a Tahitian calls a cat _mimi_; the name for a snake almost
invariably includes the hissing attributed to that creature. After a time
words which were at first simply imitations and which referred only to the
things that made these sounds came to refer to certain qualities of the
things imitated, so that the naming of other than natural objects, such as
qualities, began, leading ultimately to the use of words for qualities
belonging to many and different objects in the way of abstractions.
Much light upon the evolution of language is obtained when we treat the
speech of various races as we did the skeletal structures of cats and
seals and whales. When we compare the Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, and
French languages, they reveal the same general structure in thousands of
their words,--a common basis which in these cases is due to their
derivation from the same ancestor, the Latin tongue. The Latin word for
star is _stella_, and the Italian word of to-day is an identical and
unchanged descendant, like a persistent type of shark which lives now in
practically the same form as did its ancestor in the coal ages. The
Spanish word is _estrella_, a modified derivative, but still one that
bears in its structure the marks of its Latin origin; the French word
_�toile_ is a still more altered product of word evolution. Even in the
German _stern_, Norse _stjern_, Danish _starn_, and English _star_ we may
recognize mutual affinities and common ancestral structure. Choosing
illustrations from a different group, the Hebrew salutation "Peace be with
you," _Shalom lachem_, proves to be a blood cousin of the Arabic _Salaam
alaikum_, indicating the common ancestry of these diverse languages. Among
Polynesian peoples the Tahitian calls a house a _fare_, the Maori of New
Zealand uses _whare_, while the Hawaiian employs the word _hale_, and the
Samoan, _fale_. Whenever we classify and compare human languages, we find
similar consistent anatomical evidences of their relationships and
evolution. We can even discern counterparts of the vestigial structures
like the rudimentary limbs of whales. In the English word _night_ certain
letters do not function vocally, though in the German counterpart _Nacht_
their correspondents still play a part. In the word _dough_ as correctly
pronounced the final letters are similarly vestigial, although in the
phonetic relative _tough_ they are still sounded.
The evolution of the art of writing appears with equal clearness when we
compare the texts of modern peoples with inscriptions found on ancient
temples and monuments and tablets. Even races of the present day employ
methods of communicating ideas by writing symbols that are counterparts of
the earliest stages in the historic development of writing. An Eskimo
describes the events of a journey by a series of little pictures
representing himself in the act of doing various things. A simple outline
of a man with one arm pointing to the body and the other pointing away
indicates "I go." A circle denotes the island to which he goes. He sleeps
there one night, and he tells this by drawing a figure with one hand over
the eyes, indicating sleep, while the other hand has one finger upraised
to specify a single night. The next day he goes further and he employs the
first figure again. A second island is indicated, in this case with a dot
in the center of the circle to show a house in which he sleeps two nights,
as his figure with closed eyes and two fingers uplifted shows. He hunts
the walrus, an outline of which is given alongside of his figure waving a
spear in one hand; likewise he hunts with a bow and arrow, which is
demonstrated by the same method. A rude drawing representing a boat with
two upright lines for himself and another man with paddles in their hands
gives a further account of his journey, and the final figure is the circle
denoting the original island to which he returns.
The ancient and modern inscriptions of Asia, from the Red Sea to China,
present many significant stages in the development of picture-writing. In
earliest ages the men of Asia made actual drawings of particular objects,
such as the sun, trees, and human figures; subsequently these became
conventionalized to a certain degree, but even as late as 3000 B.C. the
Akkadian script was still largely pictographic. From it originated the
knife-point writing of Babylonian and Chaldean clay tablets, while among
the peoples of Eastern Asia, who continued to draw their symbols, the
transition to conventionalized pictures such as those made by the Chinaman
was slower and less drastic.
Just as the child's mind develops so that the aid of the picture can be
dispensed with, and the symbolic characters can be used in increasingly
complex ways, in like manner the minds of men living in successive
centuries have evolved. While an evolution of human conceptual processes
in general is not necessarily implied by the evolution of the forms of
written language, the former process is in part demonstrated by the latter
in so far as the change from the writing of pictures to the use of
conventional symbols involves an advance in human ideas of the
interpretation and value of the symbols in question. A man of ancient
times drew a tree to represent his conception of this object; in the
writing of English we now use four letters to stand for the same object,
and none of these symbols is in any way a replica of the tree. It is
certainly obvious that some change in the mental association of symbol and
object has been brought about, and to this extent there has been mental
evolution.
* * * * *
Baskets, clay vessels, and other household articles testify in the same
way to an evolution of the mental views of the people making them. The
means of transportation are even more demonstrative. The wagon of the
early Briton was like a rough ox-cart of the present day, evolved from the
simple sledge as a beginning. In its turn it has served as a prototype for
all the conveyances on wheels such as the stage-coach and the modern
Pullman. The history of locomotives, employed in the first chapter to
develop a clear conception of what evolution means, takes its place here
as a demonstration of the way human ideas about traction have themselves
evolved so as to render the construction of such mechanisms possible.
The primitive savage swimming in the sea found that a floating log
supported his weight as he rested from his efforts. By the strokes of his
arms or of a club in his hand, he could propel this log in a desired
direction; thus the dugout canoe arose, to be steadied by the outrigger as
the savage enlarged his experience. A cloth held aloft aided his progress
down or across the wind, and it became an integral element of the sailing
craft, which evolved through the stages of the galley and caravel to the
schooner and frigate of modern times. When the steam-engine was invented
and incorporated in the boat, a new line of evolution was initiated,
leading from the "Clermont" to the "Lusitania" and the battleship.
In the field of music, the earliest stages can be surmised only by a study
of the actual songs and instruments of primitive peoples now living in
wild places. No doubt the song began as a recitation by a savage of the
events of a battle or a journey in which he had participated. In giving
such a description he lives his battles again, and his simulated moods and
passions alter his voice so that the spoken history becomes a chant. From
this to the choral and oratorio is not very far.
Musical instruments seem to have had a multiple origin. The ram's horn of
the early Briton and the perforated conch-shell of the South Sea Islander
are natural trumpets; when they were copied in brass and other metals they
evolved rapidly to become the varied wind instruments typified to-day by
the cornet and the tuba. In the same way the reed of the Greek shepherd is
the ancestor of the flute and clarionet. Stringed instruments like the
guitar, zither, and violin form another class which begins with the bow
and its twanging string. The power of the note was intensified by holding
a gourd against the bow to serve as a resonance-chamber. When the musician
of early times enlarged this chamber, moved it to the end of the bow, and
multiplied the strings, he constructed the cithara of antiquity,--the
ancestor of a host of modern types, from the harp to the bass-viol and
mandolin.
The dance and the drama find their beginnings in the simple re�nactment of
an actual series of events. Among Polynesians of to-day the dances still
retain the rhythmic beat of the war-tread measure, and many of the motions
of the arms are more or less conventionalized imitations of the act of
striking with a club, or hurling a spear, and other acts. To such elements
many other things have been added, but the fact remains that our own
formal dances, as well as the sun-dance of the Indian and the mad whirl of
the Dervish, are modern products which have truly evolved.
* * * * *
As we look back over the facts that have been cited, and as we contemplate
the large departments of knowledge about human psychology, mental
development, and racial culture which these few details illustrate, we
come to realize how securely founded is the doctrine that even the human
mind with all its varied powers has grown to be what it is. Indeed, it is
solely due to his mental prowess that man has attained a position above
that of any lower animal. And yet every human organ and its function can
be traced to something in the lower world; it is a difference only in
degree and not in category that science discovers. The line connecting
civilized man with the savage leads inevitably through the ape to the
lower mammalia possessing intelligence, and on down to the reflex organic
mechanisms which end with the _Amoeba_. It is a long distance from the
mechanical activities of the protozo�n to the processes of human thought;
yet the physical basis of the latter is a cellular mechanism and nothing
more, developed during a single human life in company with all other
organs from a one-celled starting-point--the human egg.
* * * * *
Our present knowledge of the nature and history of human mentality enables
us to learn many lessons that have a direct practical value, although it
is impossible under the present limitations to give them the full
discussion they deserve. Starting from the dictum that physical
inheritance provides the mechanism of intellect, education and training of
any kind prove to be effective as agents for developing hereditary
qualities or for suppressing undesirable tendencies. Just as wind-strewn
grains of wheat may fall upon rock and stony soil and loam, to grow well
or poorly or not at all according to their environmental situations, so
children with similar intellectual possibilities would have their growth
fostered or hampered or prevented by the educational systems to which they
were subjected. But the common-sense of science demonstrates that the
mental qualities themselves could not be altered _in nature_ by the
circumstances controlling their development any more than the hereditary
capability of the wheat grains to produce wheat would be altered by the
character of the ground upon which they fell. Education and training thus
find their sphere of usefulness is developing what it is worth while to
bring out, and inhibiting the growth of what is harmful. That heredity in
mental as well as in physical aspects provides the varying materials with
which education must deal is a fundamental biological fact which is too
often disregarded. It would be as futile for an instructor to attempt the
task of forcing the children in a single schoolroom into the same mental
mold, as it would be for a gymnasium master to expect that by a similar
course of exercise he could make all of his students conform to the same
identical stature, the same shape of the skull, or the same color of the
eye and hair.
* * * * *
According to the first view, the individual thoughts and feelings forming
elements in the chain of consecutive consciousness are affected by the
events in the material physiology of the brain as a physical structure;
the latter in turn react upon the psychical or mental elements. Thus there
would be two complete series of phenomena, which are interdependent and
interacting at all times, although each would be in itself a complete
chain of elements.
But whichever one of these explanations we choose to adopt as our own, the
basic fact of primary importance is that there is an invariable dependence
of human thought upon a brain comprising a highly developed cerebrum,
whatever may be the ultimate nature of the way mental processes are
determined by physical processes, or _vice versa_. This fact stands
unquestioned and unassailable; human faculty and the brain cannot be
considered apart, even if they may not actually be different aspects of
the same basic "mind-stuff," as Clifford calls the ultimate dual thing.
Like all of the other organs of lesser importance belonging to the nervous
system, the brain is a complex of tissues which in the last analysis are
groups of cell-bodies with their fibrous prolongations. When these
cellular elements are in operation, mental processes go on; the unit of
the mental process therefore is the functioning of a brain-cell. But we
know that the substance of a brain-cell is the wonderful physical basis of
life called protoplasm, that demanded our attention at the outset. The
chemicals that go to make up protoplasm are everywhere carbon, hydrogen,
oxygen, and other substances that are exactly the same outside the body as
inside. It is the combination of these substances in a peculiar way which
makes protoplasm, and it is the combination of their individual properties
which in a real even though unknown manner gives the powers to protoplasm,
even to that of a living brain-cell. Does science teach us, then, that the
ultimate elements of human faculty are carbon-_ness_ and hydrogen-_ness_,
and oxygen-_ness_, which in themselves are not mind, but which when they
are combined, and when such chemical atoms exist in protoplasm, constitute
mental powers? Plain common-sense answers in the affirmative. We need not,
indeed, we must not, attribute mind as such to rock salt or to the water
of a stream, but we do know that salts and water and other dead substances
may enter into the composition of the material brain which is the physical
basis of mind.
VII
If now this new field is actually to be included within the scope of the
laws controlling the rest of nature's evolution, two general conclusions
must be established. Although no formal order need be followed, it must at
some time be shown that human social relations are biological relations,
to be best explained only through their comparison with the far simpler
modes of association found by the biologist among lower orders of beings;
and in the second place it must be demonstrated that identical biological
laws, uniform in their operation everywhere in the organic world, have
controlled the origin and establishment of even the most complex societies
of men. So far no reason has been discovered by science for believing that
evolution has been discontinuous, holding true only for the merely
physical characteristics of humanity as a whole; and furthermore, the
impersonal student of nature finds ample positive evidences showing that
the basic laws of associations of whatever grade are exactly the same. For
these laws we are to seek.
A more explicit preliminary statement must now be given of the grounds for
the belief that social evolution is but a part of organic evolution in
general. Some of these reasons are not far to seek, but their cogency can
scarcely be appreciated until we have examined the concrete facts of the
whole biological series. Any human society selected for examination--be it
a tribe, a village community, or a nation--is in last analysis an
aggregate of human units and nothing besides. Its life consists of the
combined activities of such components--and nothing else. Could we
subtract the members one by one, there would be no intangible residuum
after all the people and their lives had been taken away. When these
simple facts are recognized, it is clear at once that the concerted
activities performed by biological units cannot be anything but organic in
their ultimate basis and nature; the evolution of such activities thus
takes its place as a part of organic evolution.
But its life is incomplete if it stops with the furtherance of aims that
we may call purely selfish. Nature also demands that an _Amoeba_, again
like every other living thing, shall perpetuate its kind. The mode by
which it reproduces is ordinarily quite simple; the animal grows to a
certain bulk and then it divides into two masses of protoplasm, each of
which receives a portion of the mother nucleus. Sometimes by a peculiar
process it breaks up into numerous small fragments called spores, which
also receive portions of the parent nucleus. The most striking feature in
both kinds of reproduction in _Amoeba_ is the complete destruction of
the individual parent that exists before the act and does not afterwards.
It is quite true that every part of the mother animal passes over into one
or another of its products, but it is equally true that no one of these
products is by itself the original individual. So even the simplest animal
we know performs a task that is not only useless to itself, but is
completely destructive of itself, for nature's greater purpose of
preserving the race. We can readily see why this must be so; there is no
place in the world for a species whose members put individual well-being
above the welfare of the race, for which the production of new generations
is essential, even though the satisfaction of this demand should
necessitate the sacrifice of the parent organism. We might hesitate to use
the word "altruistic" in describing the self-destructive reproductive act
of an _Amoeba_, because this word connotes some degree of consciousness
of the existence of other than personal interests, and of the welfare of
different individuals. There is no reason to believe that such conscious
recognition of any natural duties is possible in the case of so low an
organism. But the fact remains that the result worked out by nature is the
same as though there were a definite understanding of real duties. Even
this unitary organism, then, acts mechanically so as to fulfil two primal
obligations, first _to itself_, through activities with individual benefit
as the result, and _to the race_ by the act of reproduction which closes
its individual existence and inaugurates a new generation.
Before passing to the next members of the series, which reveal additional
principles more truly social in the human sense, let us pause to note that
already we have found certain natural criteria that belong in the
department of ethics. Even in the case of the biological unit like
_Amoeba_, which is entirely solitary and unrelated to other individuals
of its kind excepting in so far as it is a link in the chain of successive
generations, any vital activity can be called good or bad, right or wrong.
Nature judges an act good and right if it tends to preserve the animal and
the species; an act is wrong and evil if it is biologically destructive of
the animal or if it interferes with the perpetuation of its kind. Again it
must be pointed out that these terms are human words, employed for the
complex conceptions that belong alone to retrospective and contemplative
human consciousness to most of us they seem to imply the existence of some
absolute standard or ideal by which a given act may be tested to see if it
is right or the opposite.
* * * * *
Without leaving the group of one-celled animals typified by _Amoeba_, we
find colonies of the most elementary biological nature, where other
natural obligations are added to the two of greatest importance. Some
species of the bell-animalcule, _Vorticella_, provide characteristic
examples of these primitive compound protozoa. Here the assemblage is made
up of one-celled individuals essentially similar to one another in
structure and in physiological activities; in the latter respect each one
of them is like _Amoeba_ as well. They may remain together for a longer
or shorter period, or during their whole existence until the time of
reproduction. Like the solitary protozo�n, each member leads a complete
life in and by itself, equivalent to that of every biological unit. It
obeys the two great laws already laid down, but in addition it seems to be
required to remain with the others for some mutual good. The biological
value of the association which imposes this additional obligation may be
found perhaps in the fact that a large group is not so readily eaten by an
enemy as an individual cell; but it is clearer that the process of
reproduction, which consists of the fusion of small "gametes," or
nucleated fragments produced by diverse or similar parents, must be
greatly facilitated by the occurrence of gamete-forming individuals in one
and the same colony. "_To remain together_" is the new duty imposed by
nature for the good of all and for the welfare of each member of the
group. Some biological advantage accrues to the several components, just
as the banding of wolves enables the pack to accomplish something which
the single wolf is unable to do, although in the latter case it is not so
much a reproductive alliance that is formed as an offensive and defensive
union.
One step higher in the scale stands the plant-form called _Volvox_, near
the border-line between the one-celled and the many-celled organisms. This
aquatic type, about the size of the head of an ordinary pin, is a hollow
spherical colony, with a wall composed of closely set cellular components.
These elements are not all alike, as in the case of colonial protozoa like
_Vorticella_, for they fall into two classes which are distinguished by
certain structural and functional characteristics. Most of them are simple
feeding individuals which absorb nourishment for themselves primarily, but
they pass on their surplus supplies to less favored neighbors if occasion
demands. The other members begin life like the first-named, but later they
become specialized to serve as reproductive individuals solely. Every
member of the colony must obey the first precept of nature, otherwise it
would be unable to play its part in the life of the whole community. But
the discharge of the second natural obligation, namely to preserve the
race, is here assigned to some, and to some only, of the whole group of
cell individuals. It follows therefore that the division of the tasks
necessary for the maintenance of a complete biological individual, and the
differentiation of the members of the group into two kinds, leads to the
establishment of an individuality of a higher order than the cell. Neither
the purely nutritive nor the reproducing member is complete in itself; the
two kinds must be combined to make a perfect organism. The life of any
member can be selfish no longer, for if it is to exist itself, it must
help others for the mutual advantage of all. A clear social relation is
thus established; and the reflex conduct of the units of a _Volvox_ colony
can be justly denoted altruistic, even though in this case, as before,
there can be no conscious recognition of the reasons why mutual interests
are best served by what is actually done.
We now reach the realm of the true many-celled animals, or Metazoa, where
the biological units are combined to form an organic association
displaying many more resemblances to a human society. The freshwater polyp
_Hydra_, like the foregoing illustrations, is one whose structure has
already been discussed in the earlier chapters, but now we may use it for
an analysis of another series of biological phenomena. Its sac-like body
consists of two cell-layers; the outer one is concerned primarily with
offense and defense, while the inner layer is made up of digesting or
nutritive elements. The essential cells concerned solely with reproduction
lie below the outer sheet. Comparing this animal with an association like
_Volvox_, we discover the same differentiation into immortal germ-elements
and mortal cells, concerned respectively with the _Hydra's_ racial
existence and with its individual life; but far-reaching changes have come
about in the biological relationships of the second class of cells. In
describing the new phenomena it is absolutely necessary to employ the
terms of human social organization, because the _Hydra's_ body is a true
colony of diverse cells in exactly the same sense that a nation is a body
of human beings with more or less dissimilar social functions.
To begin with the differentiation into ectoderm and endoderm, the organism
is comparable to a human community made up of military and agricultural
classes. The cells of the former group protect themselves and the feeding
elements also, while the units of the second defenseless type devote
themselves to the task of provisioning the whole community, giving
supplies of food to the defenders in exchange for the protection they
afford; each kind needs the other, and each performs some distinctive task
for the other as well as for itself. But the parallel thus drawn need not
stop here. In the case of the outer layer, the cells are mostly flat
covering elements that are the first to be torn off and injured when the
animal is attacked. Scattered about among them are sense-cells standing
like sentinels with delicate upright processes which receive stimuli from
without the sense-cells transmit impulses to the network of nerve-cells
below, which is a counterpart of the signal corps of an army, keeping all
parts of the whole organization in communication with one another. Most
wonderful of all are the stinging-cells of the outer layer; these produce
a flask-shaped, poisoned bomb which is discharged by the convulsive
contraction of the cell itself so as to stun and injure the enemy or prey.
The bomb-throwing cells die immediately after they have ejected their
missiles; like soldiers participating in a forlorn hope, they sacrifice
their lives in one supreme effort of service to the cell-community of
which they are members.
These and similar facts prove conclusively that _Hydra_ is a true
community even in the human sense, and that the laws of biological
association are established at a point far below the level of the insects.
The individuality of the unit is still maintained, and each cell must
guard its own interests to a certain degree, but the original independence
of the unit has become so altered by differentiation and division of labor
that a close interdependent relation has come about. The complete
individual is now the _whole_ aggregate; it is the entire _Hydra_ itself
which must obey the primary commands of nature to live efficiently and to
perpetuate its kind. True it is that the life of the higher individual is
the sum total of the activities performed by its constituent cells, but no
one of the varied specialized elements is biologically perfect by itself
or equivalent to the whole. And, as we have seen, the welfare of the
complete animal takes precedence over that of any one of its parts, just
as the existence of a nation may be preserved only by the death of
soldiers warring for its honor and life.
If, now, we should pass on to the more complex organisms like worms and
insects and vertebrates, and should disregard the communal relations of
some of these animals, each individual proves to be like _Hydra_ as
regards the principles underlying its make-up and workings. A single bee,
like a man, is a definitely constituted aggregate of cells, differing as a
whole from _Hydra_ only in the _degree of differentiation_ exhibited by
its constituent elements. Instead of a loose network of nerve-cells there
is the far more complex nervous system whose evolution has been outlined
in the sixth chapter. The blood-vascular and respiratory and excretory
systems have become well organized, in response, so to speak, to the
demands on the part of the nervous and alimentary organs that they may be
relieved of the tasks of circulation and respiration and the discharge of
ash-wastes. Therefore the cells which make up an insect and a man are more
diverse, they have more varied interrelationships, and they are far more
interdependent then in the case of the components of _Hydra_. Yet all the
many-celled organisms that we are so accustomed to regard as individuals
are really communities, demonstrating the existence and partial antithesis
of the great laws of egoism and altruism, which are traceable even down to
_Amoeba_ and its like.
So much has been made of the lower kinds of cell-associations because the
mind of the layman is unconsciously imbued with the idea that human
society is a new thing,--an idea which we now see it is necessary to
discard at the outset. Indeed, the cell-association of the _Hydra_ and
insect type is a more compact and a more stable kind of community than any
group of human individuals worked out by nature toward the present end of
the whole scheme of evolution. That is to say, the subordination of
cell-interest to cell-group welfare, while it must not go so far as to
render the unit incapable of doing its work, is sufficiently advanced to
make uncontrolled individualism impossible. Let any class of _Hydra's_
cells, such as the nerve or muscle network, assume to exercise a selfish
preeminence or to conduct a "strike," the other classes, like the feeding
cells, would not be properly served and they would be unable in
consequence to work efficiently for the strikers. The immediate result
would be suicidal, for the selfish nerve-class would inevitably suffer
through the downfall of the whole social fabric. It is a nicely adjusted
equilibrium that is established, where the "equal rights" of all the
diverse cells consist in freedom to play a special part in the life of the
group, serving other individuals in return for their service. The Golden
Rule is a natural law as old as nature; for even in _Hydra's_ life,
unconscious discharge of duties to the race, and hence to others, is
obligatory. And all these low types of organic associations evolved ages
before the rules of human social order were vaguely recognized by the
reflective self-consciousness of man, to be formulated as the science of
ethics.
The bees take us higher in the scale, although many solitary species
occur, as well as social forms like the bumblebees where colonies are
formed in a single season only to break up with the advent of cold
weather. The honeybees, however, establish permanent communities from
which swarms may set out during the warm months to become new colonies
elsewhere. Many hundreds of bees make up a hive, and they belong to three
classes or castes, which differ in structure and social function. The
queen is a fertile female, the drones are males, and the workers are
stunted and infertile females which take no part in reproduction. In this
case the queen never discharges any menial duties, for these are attended
to by the workers; she devotes her entire time to laying eggs, which are
cared for by her subjects, who act as nurses and guards for the monarch as
well. The young workers serve at first as doorkeepers, and only later do
they take the field in the search for nectar and pollen, and work as
house-builders. Each individual performs its special task for its own
benefit and for the weal of all; each possesses an equal right to share in
the prosperity of the whole community so long as it acts altruistically as
well as egoistically. And just as the welfare of _Hydra_ is superior to
that of any one of its constituent cells, so the well-being of a hive of
bees may be safeguarded only by the actual sacrifice of some of its
members. Should food supplies be inadequate, the superfluous drones are
stung to death,--the victims of legalized murder. But more marvelous still
is the provision that is said to be made by certain individuals for their
own destruction should this become desirable. As every one knows, a
reigning queen may leave the hive with many of her subjects and "swarm" in
a new locality. When she does this, during the warm months, the workers of
the original hive feed some of the female larv� with richer food, and
place these potential queens or princesses in special roomy cells apart
from the ordinary brood chambers; one of them soon emerges to become a new
sovereign. Let us note in passing how similar this is to the production of
new egg-cells in a _Hydra_, when the mature germs of an earlier generation
are prepared and discharged. When, now, the colder weather sets in, and
the possibility of subsequent swarming is set aside, the reigning queen is
allowed by her attendant guards to visit the royal cells, whose occupants
she stings to death, thus destroying any possible claimant to her place.
And when the royal princess constructs her part of the pupal case, she
leaves an aperture so that if and when it should become necessary for the
queen to kill her, the sovereign would not injure her sting and be unable
to kill the other individuals who might become aspirants for the throne
and so precipitate a civil war! As in the case of the self-destructive act
on the part of a stinging cell in _Hydra_, altruistic subservience to the
interests of the colony can go no farther.
The ants form stable colonies of still higher grades, where the workers
are not all alike in general structure, but become more rigidly
specialized for the performance of restricted tasks. As before, there is
the fundamental differentiation into the sexual "queens" and males, and
the sterile workers concerned with the immediate material life of the
community. In some species the workers serve as herdsmen, caring for the
ant-cattle or aphids, from which they receive minute drops of a sweet
juice for food. The aphids are tended on the leaves of various plants
during the summer, and are carefully reared and stabled and fed below
ground during the winter months. In other species seeds are procured and
stored in underground granaries. The leaf-cutters are forms which grow
food supplies of fungi in subterranean mushroom gardens; the compost
consists of cuttings brought from the leaves of bushes by myriads of
workers, whose processions are guarded by larger-headed soldiers of
several ranks. In the honey-ants of Colorado and tropical America certain
individuals pass their time suspended from the roof of a large
nest-chamber, where they receive the sweet juice brought in by the workers.
They serve as animated preserve jars, distended sometimes to the size of a
grape with the communal stores of food, which they return to the workers
when external sources of food may fail. Finally there are the slaveholding
species which conduct forays upon the nests of other forms, to procure the
young of the latter, which grow up in their captors' nests and serve them
as nurses and masons and foragers. So long has this custom been
established that some slaveholders are entirely unable to feed themselves,
and would die out if their slaves failed to support them.
* * * * *
But we must not lose sight of the fundamental value of the unit during the
evolution of a higher from a lower type. The tissue-cell of _Hydra_ must
still obey the mandate to live an efficient personal life, because this is
necessary for the welfare of other cells and of the whole complex. The
original egoistic tasks are not abolished, but new duties are added to
them in ways we have learned to distinguish. In _Vorticella_ the products
of fission do not separate, and certain advantages accrue from the organic
continuity thus maintained. The success of _Hydra_ in its ceaseless
struggle to live depends wholly upon the cooperation of its differentiated
cell-units, now no longer equivalent in function to the all-powerful
_Amoeba_, although each one must be kept alive until its task is done,
or the whole association would have no place in nature. Similarly in the
higher insect community, the superadded duties to fellow-components are
even clearer, for in the competition of colony with colony, involving
terrific battles whose casualties may be numbered by thousands, the
stronger wins; and strength depends upon the concerted efforts of all the
members of the kingdom, that only collectively constitute a complete
biological whole. Mere self-protection demands altruistic conduct: if the
worker ceased to bring in food when its own hunger was satisfied, there
would be no tribal stores for the stay-at-home queens and nurses; and if
the soldier fled from the field of battle to save its own life, its act
would be suicidal ultimately, for to the degree of one unit the defense of
its non-military supporters would be weakened and they would be so much
the less unprotected during their service for the soldiers and all others.
Furthermore, we must admit the reality of natural criteria of ethical
values, established far below mankind in the scale of life. In an
ant-republic, laws are instinctively obeyed quite as implicitly as though
they were intelligibly proclaimed to all of the emmet citizens. Right is
might when community battles with community, for right is that which is
biologically favorable. And what may be correct conduct on the part of the
members of one species may be naturally wrong and evil in another case. To
kill the princesses in order to obviate the possibility of civil war seems
advantageous and therefore right when the queen remains in the persistent
colony of honeybees, ready to do her part the following spring; but it
might result in disaster and evil in the case of the social wasps, where
the community dies as such in the fall, and the continuity of the species
from one year to another requires the production of many queens lest the
severe conditions of the winter's hibernation should kill all fertile
females if only one or two were available. The standards of conduct are
simple indeed; and whether or not it may seem best to separate the
processes of social and ethical evolution culminating in human phenomena,
the fact remains that these processes begin with elements discovered by
the biologist among organisms of the lower levels in the scale.
* * * * *
We come at length to the biological interpretation of human social
evolution, in so far as this may be expounded in a simple and concise
form. The comparative method must be employed in order to discover the
fundamental attributes of savage, barbarous, and civilized communities
which seem to differ so considerably in their complexity of social
structure, and in order also to show that such basic elements are like
those of communities formed by lower animals, and are equally the products
of natural evolution. This whole subject seems to be exceedingly complex,
because in our daily contact with others of our kind and in our occasional
views of foreign races like our own, the smaller details occupy our
attention, diverting it from the great basic principles according to which
every society is organized and operates. But when once the major elements
have been discovered in civilized and more primitive nations, the
secondary and less essential phenomena fall into their proper relations,
and a statement of the whole process of development becomes relatively
simple. So much space has been devoted to lower types of communal
organisms in order to learn what the fundamentals are, and not merely to
provide analogies that may be useful hereafter. It now remains to arrange
the evidences of social progress during the history of mankind itself, and
to bring such human facts into relation with what has been discovered in
lower nature. It is helpful to begin this part of the subject by asking
ourselves what is already part of common knowledge about human history. Do
we know of any civilized nation that is absolutely stable and unvarying in
social structure, or one that has remained unchanged throughout historic
time? The answer must be negative, for in no case does the past disclose
an example of permanence in social or in any other respect; monarchies and
republics are plastic like the human frame itself. The American
Commonwealth is a relatively young social organism, and it is an easy task
to trace its growth from beginnings in the diffuse and uncorrelated
colonies of pre-Revolutionary years. Those colonies that were formed by
English settlers were transplanted outgrowths from a civilized social
parent which in its turn had clearly evolved from the state of King John's
time and the still cruder form it had under King Alfred.
Should we follow back the recorded history of any people now civilized, we
would always find evidence of ceaseless change; and the writings of
ancient historians like Herodotus and C�sar and Tacitus give a great deal
of information about the barbarous conditions from which civilization
evolved.
But much more is known that materially amplifies the account of human
progress based upon documents alone. The student of existing human races
early learns that social structure is a very varied thing. The natives of
northern Africa now live in a semi-civilized state which is very like that
of medieval England. In Siberia and the American Southwest are tribes that
correspond socially with the barbarians of Europe described by Greek and
Roman writers. The American Indians discovered by the earliest colonists,
the Polynesians of a century ago, and the Fuegians of recent decades
provide counterparts of the ancient stone-wielding people who were the
savage ancestors of European barbarians. Hence the comparative study and
classification of modern races establishes a scale of social grades which
corresponds with the order of their historic succession, just as in a
larger way the complete series of comparative anatomy from _Amoeba_ to
man displays the order of evolution from unicellular beginnings to the
present culminating types. Savagery, barbarism, and civilization are the
three major terms of this social scale, but by no means are they
discontinuous, for many intermediate forms of organization occur which are
transitional from one major type to a higher one.
In human social evolution the starting point is not so simple as the
solitary unit from which insect societies evolved,--that is, an organism
which lives alone and is associated with another of its species only at
the time of mating. The lowest human beings now existing have some form of
family organization, traceable to the more or less continuous unions
formed among certain of the apes and even among many lower animals, and
not a characteristic that belongs to mankind alone. The savage and his
mate constitute the social unit out of which all else is built up; the man
and the woman must perform all of the vital tasks demanded by nature.
Fruits and vegetables must be secured from the wild forest or by
cultivation; the flesh of game animals or of a human victim is no less
essential for food. The savage is his own weapon maker and warrior; he
himself builds the rude shelter for his family and fashions the canoe if
such is required. He is also his own judge, recognizing no control save
the dictates of his wishes and needs, for he does not consciously realize
that he must obey the primal commands of nature to preserve himself and
his family so that the species shall persist. In brief, the elementary
family unit carries on all of the individual biological tasks of foraging,
righting, home-building, and the like, and it also discharges the racial
task of multiplying, quite as instinctively as it provides for its own
maintenance.
What now are the lessons of social evolution and what guidance does
science give for human endeavor? Although it may seem that the biologist
leaves his field when he considers these questions, his duty would be
unfulfilled if he neglected an opportunity to give his results their
highest utility through their use for the betterment of human life.
The first lesson is that the history of human social organization is far
from unique, and that it is identical with the process by which insect
communities and cell-aggregates have evolved; in a word, the laws of
biological association are uniform throughout the entire organic scale. In
some respects evolution in mankind has yet to equal the heights attained
by some insects, inasmuch as no human society has accomplished so rigid a
specialization of its members that a given individual is foreordained by
its inherited structure to be a particular kind of worker and nothing
else. Furthermore, evolution in human society is still far short of a
state where some and some only are reproductive members of the group while
the others are necessarily sterile; social insects with stable colonies
are so organized that the queens and drones are solely reproductive while
the workers are destined to care for the material wants of the colony. It
is true that the birth-rate is by no means the same in all classes of
society, but the social and other adventitious restrictions that bring
this about are not on the same plane with the hereditary determining
factors which operate among insects. Therefore the scale of human
communities proves to be only a part of the wider range of organic
associations in general--a part which can be definitely placed in such a
wider scheme and so become more intelligible in itself.
But perhaps the most important result of this whole discussion is the
lesson of social service that it teaches. We are members of a vast
community whose complex total life seems far removed from anything going
on in an ant-colony, and our daily tasks vary greatly in specific
character and degree when compared with those of lower communal organisms.
It seems scarcely credible that any principles of social relationship,
however general, can hold true for us and for them. But when the
rock-bottom foundations are reached, they are simple and instructive
indeed. Being here, we cannot escape our personal obligations as living
things or our equally clear duties as members of our community. These
facts being as they are, what must we do? Self-interest is rightly to be
served, otherwise we would be incapable of discharging our secondary
tasks, namely, those of service to others in ways that are determined by
hereditary endowment and conditional circumstances. The difficulty is to
find the right compromise between the two sets of obligations; but the
right balance must be found, or else the health of the community is
impaired. Should any class demand more than its just dues, others must
suffer through the diversion of what they require, and the well-being of
the selfish class is jeopardized to some degree, so closely interwoven are
the interests of all. Freedom of opportunity within the limits of ability
and efficiency is the right of every one, but freedom of conduct must
never result in trespass upon the equal rights of others to make the most
of their abilities and opportunities.
VIII
We have now reached the last division of the large subject that has
occupied our thoughts for so long. The present title has been chosen
because the questions now before us relate to the highest human ideas
belonging to the departments of ethics, religion, theology, science, and
philosophy. These matters may seem at first sight to be far removed from
the territory of the naturalist as such, and quite exempt from the control
of laws which determine the nature and history of the human individual in
physical, mental, and social respects. Yet one reason alone would impel us
onward: we cannot close the present examination into the basic facts of
evolution and into the scope of the doctrine without asking to what extent
a belief in its truth may affect our earlier formed conceptions of nature
and supernature. Heretofore these possible effects upon what may be dearly
cherished intellectual possessions have received no attention, so that we
might learn how evolution works in the lower fields of organic life in
general and human life in particular without being disturbed by them. No
doubt, however, the conviction has grown with each step in our progress
that the principles we have learned must cause us to readjust our views of
the highest elements in human thought to a degree that must be inversely
proportional to our previous acquaintance with the laws and processes of
nature. But the seeker after truth is fearless of consequences. He knows
that truth cannot contradict itself; and if those to whom he looks for
authority give him conflicting accounts of nature's history, he knows that
one of these must be less surely grounded than the other. The investigator
soon learns to withhold final judgment, realizing that the primary
conditions for intellectual development are the plasticity and openness of
mind that dogmatism and finality destroy. He knows that while his
researches may be, and indeed must be, iconoclastic, they provide him with
better icons in place of the old.
Let us recall the steps in our progress through one and another field of
knowledge, from which representative facts have been chosen for
classification and summary. We began with the basic principles of organic
structure and workings, and then we examined serially the larger
categories of the evidences relating to evolution as a fact, and to the
mode of its accomplishment by natural factors. Proceeding to the special
case of our own species, we learned that human beings are inevitably a
part of nature and not outside it; in structure, development, and
pal�ontological history, mankind is subject to the control of the uniform
laws which operate throughout the entire range of living things. Finally,
the mental characters and the social relations of human organisms were
derived from beginnings lower down in the scale, and were proved to be no
more exceptional than the physical constitution of a single human being.
Are we to forget all of these things when we try to put in order our ideas
belonging to the categories of higher thought? Can we hope to find the
truth if we fail to employ the methods of scientific common-sense which
only yield sure results? It is no more justifiable to discard our
hard-earned knowledge than it would be for an advocate to undertake the
conduct of a case in deliberate disregard of what he had learned of the
law, or for a surgeon to leave his knowledge at the door when he entered
the operating room. Too often we are bidden to view the larger conceptions
of nature and supernature as something outside the realm of ordered
knowledge too frequently we are given statements upon authority that takes
no account of reason, and we are asked to accept these views whether or not
they accord with the demonstrated facts of common-sense. But those who
have followed the present description of evolution can readily recognize
their obligation to use for the further analysis of higher human life the
means which have given in that doctrine the most reasonable explanation of
the natural phenomena already investigated.
I need hardly say that we now enter upon the most difficult stage of our
progress. The regions we have traversed were more readily explored because
they were remote from the matters now before us; even in the case of man's
mental and social evolution it was possible to take a partially impersonal
view of certain of the essential elements in human life, which we cannot
do now. For ethics and religion and philosophy are groups of ideas that
are familiar to us as the property of mankind alone. Countless obstacles
are in the way. Much mental inertia must be overcome, for it is far easier
to accept the average and traditional judgments of other men--to let well
enough alone--than it is to win our own way to the heights from which we
may survey knowledge more fully. Human prejudices confront us as a
veritable jungle, hemming us in and obstructing our vision on all sides;
and perhaps much underbrush must be cut away if we are to see widely and
wisely. Nevertheless, to those imbued with a desire to learn truth,
anything and everything gained must surely repay a thousand times all
efforts to obtain clearness of vision and breadth of view. With our
perspective thus rectified by our backward glance, we turn to the three
divisions of human thought now to be examined. The conceptions of ethics
come first for reasons that must be apparent from the classification of
the facts of social evolution; just as mental attributes and communal
organization are inseparable, so rules of conduct arise _pari passu_ with
the origin of a biological association. Religion and theology form the
second division, which takes its origin in part from the first, for these
two groups of ideas are largely concerned with the authority for right
conduct and with human responsibility for taking the right attitude toward
the entire visible and unseen universe. Finally, science and philosophy
are briefly treated as evolved products which include within their scope
all that there is in human knowledge; for this reason they take the
highest place, instead of the position below religion usually assigned to
them. At the last, having reached our final standing ground, we must look
back in order that we may clearly define the lessons and ultimate values
of the whole doctrine of evolution.
* * * * *
Those who have followed the account of social evolution given in the
preceding chapter must realize that the basic general principles of
natural ethics, as contrasted with "formal" ethics, have already been
discovered and formulated. A biological association of whatever grade and
degree of complexity is impossible unless biological duties are
discharged. Human ethical conduct differs from insect and protozo�n
ethical conduct only in the element of a participation in the process by
the explicit consciousness of man that he has definite obligations to
others; and this distinguishing characteristic is the direct outcome of an
evolution which adds reflection and conceptual thought to a mental
framework derived from prehuman ancestors. The insect hurries about in its
daily life as an animated machine, whose activities are defined by
heredity; its special mode of conduct is just what nature has produced by
selection from among countless other forms of living which have not had
the same degree of biological utility. But man alone recognizes vaguely or
clearly the "why and wherefore" of his acts that are far more instinctive
than he supposes; he only is consciously aware of the bonds of kinship and
economic interdependence. He looks about for the authority which imposes
his duties and fashions his bonds, and conceives this authority as
something superhuman, until the comparative studies of evolutionary
phenomena reveal the true causes in uniform nature itself.
But utilitarian or natural ethics need not stop with the statement of
vague generalities like the foregoing. In human society, as in the life of
low animals, the worth and value of any form of conduct and of every
single act can be estimated by definite biological criteria. The
institution of marriage and the conventions of common morality have their
biological value in their provision for the care of children; the
safeguards of property rights enable the industrious--the biologically
efficient--to keep the fruits of their labors; the establishment of formal
civil and criminal laws is biologically valuable in a social way, in so
far as such laws diminish the unsettling effects of personal animosity and
the desire to wreak personal vengeance; the establishment and
differentiation of legislative, executive, and judicial organs of
government lead to greater social solidarity and higher biological
efficiency. Thus unchecked individualism is just as wrong ethically and
biologically among men as it would be in the case of insect communities,
as pointed out in the preceding chapter; no one has a right to expect
service or deference to personal interest from others if he fails to work
for them and for the good of all. It is true that the social structure
will stand a great amount of tension, but if this becomes too great,
either a readjustment is effected, as when King John was forced by the
barons to concede their rights, or else the whole nation suffers, owing to
the selfishness of a few. In the war between Russia and Japan, the latter
won because the individual soldier merged his individuality in the larger
mechanism of the regiment and brigade and army corps, gladly sacrificing
his life for the nation represented by the person of its Emperor. The
single Russian soldier may have been far superior to a Japanese in
muscular strength, and perhaps in arms also, but selfishness and greed on
the part of many who were responsible for the organization and equipment
of the Russian armies rendered the whole fighting machine less coherent
and therefore less efficient than that of the Japanese.
Such a broad comparative study, like that of physical, mental, and social
phenomena discussed heretofore, must be conducted objectively; that is,
each and every particular belief of a religious or theological nature
which can be discovered in any race is entitled to a place in the array of
materials which demand scientific treatment. They must be verified,
classified, and summarized, in order that their total meaning and value
can be discovered. It must be strongly emphasized that for such purposes
the inherent validity and truth or falsity of diverse religions are not
called into question when they are so considered as objects of study; many
still entertain the view that the mere task of conducting an analysis of a
group of religious beliefs of whatever nature must tend to destroy or
alter that system of religion in some way and degree. But whatever the
comparative student may himself believe, the conception of Jehovah in the
Hebrew religion is quite as legitimate an object of study as the
Buddhistic concept of Brahma as the Ultimate Being, or the Polynesian idea
of Tangaroa as the god of the waves. We would naturally be inclined to
exclude the last from our own personal system of piety and worship as the
childish concept of an imaginative, adolescent race; but whatever the
truth may be, the fact of a belief in Tangaroa is as real as the fact of
Christian belief in God. We can no more destroy any one of these ideas by
investigating its nature and origin than we destroy the efficacy of the
human arm when we study its muscles and bones and sinews. The former, like
the latter, take their places among natural phenomena whose history must
be inquired into if there are any reasons for supposing that they fall
within the scope of evolution. I would be the last to lead or to take part
in an attack upon any system of religion, but as a student who is
interested in the universality of organic evolution, I am forced to
scrutinize each and every authentic account of a religion to see if such
systems present objective evidence of the fact of their evolution through
the operation of purely natural causes.
Only within recent years have systematic attempts been made to classify
religions on the basis of impersonal objective study. Throughout all times
men have instinctively set up their own religion as the only true one,
besides which all others are designated simply as false--a very natural
distinction, but one which is too na�ve for science, as well as one that
takes into account subjective or personal values which are not to be
considered in an objective comparison and analysis. The linguistic basis
was first employed by M�ller, with the result that religions were placed
in the category of evolutionary accompaniments of the other mental
possessions and of the physical qualities of genetically connected
peoples. Thus the nations of Europe that branched out in all directions
from very nearly the same sources possessed common linguistic characters
and somewhat similar creeds. The Sanskrit-speaking races were the original
Brahmins and Buddhists. Ancestor worship is an accompaniment of the
peculiar languages spoken by eastern Mongolian peoples. And although the
correlation specified is by no means invariable, because a race of one
stock can readily accept the religion of a neighbor or of a conqueror, yet
much is gained through the introduction of the idea of evolutionary
relationships.
* * * * *
Buddha was an orthodox Brahman reformer of the sixth century before our
present era, just as Jesus was an orthodox Hebrew reformer. The essential
creed of Buddha made his religion far more ethical than earlier forms, and
placed it on a plane even above Christianity of later centuries. This
creed relates to the element of human responsibility particularly, the
other two remaining much as they were found by Buddha. According to his
teachings, a man rested under an obligation to live nobly in the truest
sense, and he acquired merit--_karma_--or lost it, in proportion to his
deserts. At death a human soul is reincarnated, in a lower form of animal
or even in a being residing in one of a series of unseen hells, if
punishment is due; if a higher state is merited, progress is made through
thousands of existences until perfection is rewarded by an eternal fusion
with the essence of Brahma. It is because there is no escape from just
punishment that Buddhism in its original form is properly denoted more
ethical than a religion which teaches that sacrifice of any kind will
exempt the sinner from deserved penalties and bring about the bestowal of
unearned rewards.
Roman theology and religion comprise almost identical forms of the three
fundamental elements. The names are changed, and Zeus becomes Jove, his
wife Hera is Juno, Ares is Mars, and Hermes is called Mercury. In all
other respects, however, the two systems are as much alike as the Greek
and Roman languages and Greek and Roman physique.
The religions of savagery are far less analytical, and much more na�ve in
their reference of natural happenings to the direct interposition of
malevolent and benevolent spirits. Their gods are numerous as in Greek
religion, and likewise one of them is usually set up as the superior
deity, to be the Tirawa of the Indian, the greater Atua of Polynesia, and
the Mumbo Jumbo of a West African negro. There is no centralization of the
supernatural powers, as in the Jehovah of Judaism and the still subtler
Brahma of the Asian. Then, too, the gods must be concretely materialized
for purposes of worship and sacrifice; consequently idols are made, to be
regarded as the actual spirits themselves permanently or for the time
being, and not viewed as representations of an ideal, like the statues of
more advanced peoples. The immortal state is described in low religions in
various ways that seem to be determined by what the believer himself most
desires. The spirit of an American Indian goes to the happy
hunting-grounds, where it mounts a spirit pony and forever pursues the
ghosts of bison which it kills with spirit bow and arrows; to provide these
necessaries his earthly possessions are laid beside his dead body. The
Norseman was conducted to Valhalla and, attended by the Valkyrie as
handmaidens, he eternally drank mead from the skull of an enemy and
gloried over his mundane prowess in battle. It is unnecessary to expand
the foregoing list, because the examples sufficiently represent the
various grades of human religions. Regarding them as typical, we can see
how universal are the three fundamental ideas with which we are concerned.
Every race has its own conception of future bliss, as well as its
conception of responsibility to the immortal and supernatural powers of
the universe. Whatever may be the actual reality, and however closely the
conceptions of one or another religion may approximate to the truth, such
reality and approximation are not the subjects of the present discussion.
Nor is it our purpose to bring out more explicitly the genetic
relationship of one religion to another; the evolution of Buddhism from
Brahmanism, the origin of Christianity from Judaism, and the divergent
development of the several creeds of Christendom amply illustrate the
nature of religious history. It is evolution here as elsewhere and
everywhere.
* * * * *
Let us now summarize the results of the foregoing brief survey, conducted
by the identical methods employed for the analysis of other bodies of
fact. We have sought for those characteristics which are common to all
religions of whatever time and place and race. Combined with many
secondary and adventitious elements of other fields of thought and action,
such as social, political, ethical, and psychological factors, they have
proved to be the three essential beliefs in God or gods, human
responsibility, and immortality. As a veritable backbone, they underlie
and support the whole body of religious doctrine and organs of thought
formed about them. We have seen, furthermore, that a natural explanation
of the way these elements have originated can be discovered by the
comparative student of religion, who describes also how they have
variously evolved among different peoples. In all of this we have not
questioned at any time the validity or reality of any one of these
concepts; to ask whether or not they correspond actually to the truth is
beyond our purpose, which is simply and solely to inquire whether even
these mental conceptions furnish evidence of their evolution in the course
of time. I believe that such evidence is found, and I believe also that
this discovery must be of the greatest importance to everyone in
formulating a system of religious belief, but the construction of this is
not the task of science as such. Every individual must work out his own
relation to the world on the basis of knowledge as complete as he can make
it, but every individual must accomplish this end for himself. Because no
two men can be exactly alike in temperament, intellect, and social
situation, it is impossible for entire agreement in religious faith to
exist. One's outlook upon the whole universe is and must be an individual
matter; science and evolution are of overwhelming value, not by directing
the mind to adopt this or that attitude toward the unseen, but by
providing the seeker after the truth with definite knowledge about the
things of the world, so that his position may be taken on the sound basis
of reasonable and common-sensible principles.
* * * * *
Let us look back over the history of mathematics. The primitive human
individual did not need to count. He dealt with things as he met them, and
he disposed of them singly and individually. A squirrel does not count the
nuts it gathers; it simply accumulates a store, and it perishes or
survives according to its instinctive ability to do this. Just so was
primitive man. The savage, when he organized the first formed tribes,
learned to count the days of a journey and the numbers engaged on opposite
sides in battle. He employed the "score" of his fingers and toes, and our
use of this very word is a survival of such a primitive method of
counting. The abacus of the Roman and Chinese extended the scope of simple
mathematical operations as it employed more symbolic elements. With the
development of Arabic notation capable of indefinite expansion, the
science progressed rapidly, and in the course of long time it has become
the higher calculus of to-day. The conceptions of geometry have likewise
evolved until to-day mathematicians speak of configurated bodies in fourth
and higher dimensions of space, which are beyond the powers of perception,
even though in a sense they exist conceptually. The behavior of
geometrical examples in one dimension leads to the characteristics of
bodies in two dimensions. Upon these facts are constructed the laws of
three-dimensional space which serve to carry mathematical thought to the
remoter conceptual spaces of which we have spoken. It may seem that we are
recording only one phase of mental evolution, but in fact we are dealing
with a larger matter, namely, with the progressive evolution of knowledge
in the Kantian category of number.
Natural science began with the savage's rough classification of the things
with which he dealt in everyday life. As facts accumulated, lifeless
objects were grouped apart from living organisms, and in time two great
divisions of natural science took form. Physics, chemistry, astronomy,
geology, and the like describe the concrete world of matter and energy,
while the biological sciences deal with the structure, development,
interrelationships, and vital activities of animals and plants. Surely
knowledge has evolved with the advance in all of these subjects from
decade to decade and from year to year. And just as surely must evolution
continue, for the world has not stopped developing, and therefore the
great principles of science must undergo further changes, even though they
are the best summaries that can be formulated at the present time.
* * * * *
In closing the present description of the basis, nature, and scope of the
doctrine of evolution, I find great difficulty in choosing the right words
for a concise statement of the larger values and results of this
department of science. So much might be said, and yet it is not fitting
for the investigator to preach unduly. The lessons of the doctrine must be
brought home to each individual through personal conviction. But because I
firmly believe in the truth of the statement made in the opening pages,
namely, that science and its results are of practical human value, it is
in a sense my duty as an advocate of evolution to make this plain.
The doctrine of evolution enjoins us to learn the rules of the great game
of life which we must play, as science reveals them to us. It is well to
remember that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, but because
evolution is true always and everywhere, an understanding of its workings
in any department of thought and life clears the vision of other realms of
knowledge and action. Perhaps the greatest lesson is at the same time the
most practical one. It is that, however much we may concern ourselves with
ultimate matters, our immediate duties are here and now, and we cannot
escape them without giving up our right to a place in nature. We are
taught by science that we live under the control of certain fundamental
biological, social, and ethical laws; we might well wish that they were
otherwise, but having recognized them we have no recourse save to obey
them. Evolution as a complete doctrine commands every one to live a life
of service as full as hereditary endowments and surrounding circumstances
will permit. Thus we are taught that the immediate problems of life ought
to concern us more than questions as to the ultimate nature of the
universe and of existence.
Every one can find something worth while in the lessons of evolution,
summarized in the foregoing statements. The atheist, who declines to
personify the ultimate powers of the universe, may, nevertheless, find
direction for his life in the principles brought to light by science. The
agnostic, who doubts the validity of many conventional dicta that may not
seem well grounded, can also find something to believe and to obey.
Finally, the orthodox theist of whatever creed may discover cogent reasons
for many of his beliefs like the Golden Rule previously accepted through
convention; and he must surely welcome the fuller knowledge of their sound
basis in the materials and results of comparative analytical study. To
every one, then, science and evolution offer valuable principles of life,
but great as their service has been, their tasks are not yet completed,
and cannot be completed until the end of all knowledge and of time.
INDEX
Ant-bears, 42.
Anthropoidea, 160.
Anthropology, 177;
methods and results of, 186;
types of, 186, 187;
comparative, of mind, 211.
Anthropometry, 177.
Apes, 158;
susceptible to training, 210;
line from Amoeba, 231.
Arachnida, 49.
Ares, 300.
Armadillo, 42.
Atua, 301.
Bandicoot, 42.
Beetles, 67.
Bernier, 183.
Bertillon, 183.
Birds, 44;
have they descended from gill-breathing ancestors? 61;
evolution of, 63;
primitive, 99;
embryos of, 171, 200.
Blastula, 68.
Blumenbach, 183.
Bonnet, 70.
Borneo, 164.
Brachiopods, 95.
Brontosaurus, 94.
Brown-S�quard, 148.
Buddha, 299.
Celts, 218.
Cerebrum, 215.
Cetacea, 40.
Classes, 32.
Classification, 32.
Clifford, 238.
Coccyx, 168.
Conscience, 287.
Cyclones, 85.
Cyclostomes, 156.
Daphnia, 205.
Deer, 42;
fossil, of North America, 97, 98.
Development, 54;
a natural process, 56.
Dinosaurs, 94.
Dubois, 173.
Eagle, 44.
Earthquake, 85.
Ectoderm, 255.
Eimer, 148.
Elephant, 41;
place in zo�logical science, 95; 96, 97;
age of, 124.
Erosion, 89.
Eskimo, picture-writing, 223.
Ethics, 281;
biological, 283;
natural, 284;
evolution of, 285.
Ethnology, 177.
Fiske, 139.
Fossils, 73-105;
remains of, 73;
groups, 77; 78, 79;
order of succession, 91;
oldest rocks devoid of, 92;
forms, 99.
Frog, 45;
eggs of, larva, development of, 58, 59, 60, 68.
Gametes, 252.
Gastrula, 68.
Gemmules, 143.
Genera, 32.
Gibbon, 163.
Giraffe, 133.
Goats, 157.
Gravitation, 155.
Gulick, 103.
H�moglobin, 22.
Hapalid�, 160.
Harvey, 70.
Heredity, 142;
a real human process, 175;
instinct determined by, 206;
Anglo-Saxon, 213;
of mental qualities, 232.
Heron, 44.
Hesperornis, 99.
Hippopotamus, 42.
Hominid�, 160.
Ichthyornis, 99.
Ichthyosaurus, 94.
Inertia, 155.
Intelligence, 203;
in mental life of communal insects, 207.
Jaguar, 101.
Jastrow, 294.
Java, 173.
Jellyfish, 81.
Kangaroo, 42.
Keane, 185.
Lampreys, 156.
Laplace, 29.
Lavoisier, 29.
Links, 99.
Lions, 101;
environment of, 112.
Lobsters, 66;
larv� of, 66.
MacDougal, 148.
Madagascar, 161.
Mallock, 295.
Malthus, 136.
Mammalia,
lower orders of, 42;
their own mode of growing up, 64;
embryos of, 64; 97;
members of class differ, 157, 158; 200;
order of mentality, 203.
Mammoth, 97.
Marmosets, 161.
Marquesas, 103.
Marsupials, 104.
Mastodon, 97.
Mechanism,
organic, 14;
living, 110.
Melanesia, 103.
Metazoa, 254.
Miller, 293.
Mind,
anatomy of, 202;
human, differs only in degree, 203; 210, 211;
embryology of, 214;
pal�ontology of, 217;
and matter inseparable, 234-237.
Monkeys, 158.
Moths, 67.
M�ller, 293.
Natural Selection,
doctrine of, 116, 117, 118;
the struggle for existence, 124, 125;
simply trial and error, 131;
Darwin recognized it as incomplete, 142;
germ-plasm theory supplements, 145.
Orders, 32.
Organic, 15;
systems, 17;
transformation, analogies of, 43,
a real and natural process, 55, 56, 76;
mechanism, alteration of, 55.
Organisms,
living, 14;
analysis of, 16; 17, 18, 19, 26, 28, 29, 31, 32;
characteristic early stages, 55;
are they adapted by circumstances? 109;
environment, 111;
physical heritage of, 113;
variation of, 119;
difference, 121;
universal conflict of, 127;
change, 130;
human, 32, 156, 159, 165-171;
nervous system of, 201;
psychical characteristics of, 202;
many-celled, 257.
Osborn, 148.
Ostrich, 44.
Paludina, 95.
Partul�, 103.
Peoples,
fusion of, 178, 179;
Mexicans, 178, 181;
Anglo-Saxon, 179;
American, 179;
Indians, 181, 183, 185, 191, 192;
Patagonian, 180, 192;
Polynesian, 181, 182, 187;
Moor, 181;
Zulu, 181, 183;
Malay, 181, 183, 190;
Mongolian, 181, 186-190;
Papuan, 182;
Negro, African, Ethiopian, 182, 183, 192-195;
Caucasian, 182, 185-189, 195;
Veddahs, 182, 188;
European, 183;
Asiatic, 183;
Laplander, 183, 190;
Scandinavian types,
Norwegians, Swedes, Danes, Germans--north and south--186, 187;
types of, 186-196;
Persians, 186,
eastern, 187;
Afghans, Hindus, 186;
Welsh, French, Swiss, 187;
Russians, 187-190;
Poles, Armenians, 187;
Mediterranean type,
Spaniard, Italian, Greek, Arab, 187;
subordinate group,
Semitic, Arab, Hebrew, 187;
North African, Berber, Hamites, 187;
relatives of the Mediterranean,
Dravidas, Todas, Veddahs, Ainus, 188;
Manchurian, Chukchi, Buryats, Yukaghir, 189;
Finlander, Bulgar, Magyar, Korean, Japanese, Gurkhas, Burmans, Annams,
Cochin Chinese, Tagals, Bisayans, Hovars, 190;
Pueblos, Eskimos, Aztecs, Mayas, Caribs, 191;
Yahgan, Alacaluf, 191;
Papuan, Australian, 193;
Negrito section,
Adamans, Kalangs, Sakais �tas, Bushmen, Hottentots, Akkas, 194.
Periods,
Triassic, Jurassic, 94;
Eocene, Miocene, 96.
Phenacodus, 96.
Phyla, 32.
Phylogeny, 63.
Pictography, 223-226;
of Eskimos, of American Indians, 223, 224;
of Asia, 224;
of Egypt, 224, 225.
Pithecanthropus, 174.
Plesiosaurus, 94.
Prosimii, 160.
Protoplasm, 22-30;
the physical basis of life, 143; 144;
human, 156;
chemicals that make up, 156.
Protozo�n, 251.
Psychology,
comparative, 198;
principle of, 199;
descriptive, genetic, 202;
terms of, 203;
human, 210, 211.
Pseudopodia, 52.
Puma, 101.
Pupa, 259.
Races, human,
age of, 178;
divisions of, 183-195;
character of:
status, variations of, 180, 181;
color, a criterion of racial relationship, 181, 184;
hair, character of, as means of classification, 181, 182;
cranium, shape of, as means of identification, nose, jaws, 182.
Racoon, 38.
Reason, 203;
in mental life of communal insects, 207.
Religions, 288;
Christian, Hebrew, Buddhistic, Tangaroan, 289, 290;
Mohammedan, 290, 298;
Dervish, Mahdist, 293;
linguistic basis of, 293, 294;
of savagery, 294, 300, 301;
barbarism, civilization, 294;
elements of, 295;
forms of Christianity, 296;
sects,
Judaism, 297, 298;
Brahmanism, Buddhism, 298, 299;
Polytheism, Roman, 300.
Rhinoceros, 41.
Rivers,
Mississippi, 86, 89;
Hoang-ho, Ganges, Thames, 87;
alterations made by, 87.
Sandstone, 90.
Selection,
natural, doctrine of, 116, 117, 118;
struggle for existence, 124, 125;
simply trial and error, 131, 136,
artificial, 136, 137, 138;
laws of, in mental phenomena, 203.
Series,
sedimentary, 84, 90, 92;
crystalline or plutonic, 85;
Azoic or Arch�an, age of, 92.
Shale, 89.
Shark,
common, most fundamental form, 46;
embryo of, hammerhead;
embryos of, 66.
Sheep, 157.
Snails, 45;
shells of, 95;
land snails, 103;
Hawaiian and Polynesian, 104.
Spencer, Herbert, 8.
Squirrels,
evolved from terrestrial rodents, 14; 41;
flying, true rodents, 41.
Starch, 24.
Stephenson, 10.
Systems,
respiratory, excretory, circulatory, 17;
organic, reproductive, 18;
nervous, 256, 257;
blood-vascular, respiratory and excretory, 257;
ethical, 286;
religious, 288.
Tapir, 41;
Moeritherium, 97.
Thorndike, 209;
heredity of mental qualities, 232.
Tidal waves, 85.
Tigers, 101.
Tirawa, 301.
Tissue-cells, 28.
Torga, 183.
Tower, 148.
Tribes, 32.
Ungulates, 65.
Urea, 29.
Variation, 110;
causes of, 111;
among individuals, 112, 113;
fact of difference, phenomenon of, 114; 115, 118, 119, 121, 129;
congenital, 138;
human, 174;
racial, 177;
laws of, in mental phenomena, 203; 232.
Vertebrata, 43.
Vertebrates,
backboned animals, fishes the lowest order of, 46;
principles of relationship, families, tribes, 47; 53-59;
great classes originate together, 64;
more complicated, 68;
skeleton remains of, succeed invertebrates, 92;
testimony of the rocks, 93;
largest, 94;
appearance of great classes of, 94; 95;
classes that make up, 156;
lower, arrangement of organs, 201;
nervous system of, 256, 257.
Volcanoes, 88.
Volvox, 252, 254, 259, 265.
Wagner, 100.
Walruses, 38.
Wasps,
ground, 207;
organizations, of digger, 260; 261.
Weisner, 143.
Whales, 40.
Wilson, 146.
Woehler, 29.
Wolff, 70.
Wolves, 140.
Wombat, 42.
Wood-frog, 71.
Worms,
blindworm of England, 45; 48, 50, 53, 81;
nervous mechanism of, 205, 206;
nervous system of, 256, 257.
"Zo�nomia," 135.
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